After 18 months of development, Geeklog 1.5.0 has been released.  As I mentioned last month, changes found in Geeklog 1.5.0 incorporates the following projects implemented during the 2007 Google Summer of Code:

• New user-friendly install script
• New Configuration Graphical User Interface
• New Webservices API based on the Atom Publishing Protocol

Additional new features and enhancements included in this release:

• OpenID support.
• New LDAP remote authentication module.
• Updated FCKeditor to version 2.6.
• Rewrite of the underlying story code which addresses issues with special characters and HTML entities.
• Comments can now be closed, i.e. existing comments will still be displayed but no new comment can be posted.
• The Polls plugin now allows for multiple questions per poll.
• The Static Pages plugin now supports comments.
• The database backup admin panel now lets you delete and download backups.
• Theming improvements including the support of XHTML.

Geeklog 1.5 can be downloaded at Geeklog.net.

Google Code: "Google Summer of Code 2008 is on! Over the past three years, the program has brought together over 1500 students and 2000 mentors from 90 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. This year, we're welcoming 1125 student contributors and 175 Free and Open Source projects into the program. You can find out more about each participating organization and abstracts of their accepted students' proposals by visiting each organization's page, below. We'll be posting regular news about the program to the Google Open Source Blog."

Complete Story

"Every summer since 2005, Google has offered what is essentially a paid internship to open source groups. Students are offered the opportunity to work with open source development groups to complete projects, often resulting in significant advances for both the student’s knowledge and the developments they’ve worked on. These projects, combined or otherwise, are some of the biggest successes we’ve seen come out of Google’s Summer of Code."

Complete Story at Virtual Hosting Blog

"For the Drupal community's participation in the 2007 Google Summer of Code program, Google donated $10,000 USD to the Drupal Association earlier this week. This amount represents 10% of the $100,000 USD allocated to Drupal's Summer of Code students."

Complete Story

Sigurd Magnusson wrote to us letting us know about a YouTube video where he talks about his company's content management system, SilverStripe. The video was recorded while at a recent function at Google for software developers.

Here's some interesting content for both you and your readers, providing a  quick overview of our project, company and our success with the Google  Summer of Code project.  :-)

While the content management system, SilverStripe, has been on my radar for some time I never really took the time to cover the Web application here at CMS Report.  Now it so happens that SilverStripe has been nominated as one of the most promising open source CMS out there.  About the only thing I can do to correct my oversight is to put SilverStripe on a list of the "top 30" CMS we focus on here at CMS Report.  Sadly, mostly out of nostalgia, SilverStripe will be bumping Simple PHP Blog off the "CMS Focus" list.

Earlier this month, SilverStripe 2.1 was released.  The folks on the SilverStripe team appear pretty excited about this release, with just the right synergy brewing to give this CMS a good future.  Some of the new features and improvements in SilverStripe 2.1 include:

• New security system (benefiting from Google Summer of Code)
• Blog Module (with drag-n-drop widget support including tag clouds, RSS feed, etc)
• Support for Updated Gallery Module

Download links to SilverStripe 2.1 are available via SilverStripe.com.

"In the previous Summer Of Code blog Johan explained the projects that have been selected for this year. In the past month the students have been introduced to their mentor and prepared their project…in short they are ready to start. Official Summer Of Code schedule says that coding needs to start on May 28Th, so time for a short update."

Complete Story

"Accepted student applications for Google Summer of Code have been announced! We accepted over 900 student applicants from a pool of nearly 6,200 applications.

All the mentoring organizations that will participate in Google Summer of Code 2007 are listed below. You can learn more about the accepted students and their projects by visiting each organization's "about" page."

Complete Story

I really can't display every open source project's invitation for college students to apply to Google's Summer of Code.  But just like the invitation from Drupal, Wordpress would be another one of those projects I wouldn't have minded working on when I was going to college.

Looking for something fun to do this summer? All college and university students around the world are invited to apply to get paid $4,500 USD to work on your favorite open source project this summer. WordPress is among the 131 accepted to Google Summer of Code, of more than 300 projects that applied

We have eight committed volunteers who are enthusiastic to mentor, learn, and make WordPress a little better in the process.

Check out our ideas for projects, or propose your own. You must apply by March 24. Good luck!  Original Post

Coding during my college years would have been a whole lot more fun than some of the jobs I did have while in school.  There is only so much reward you can get from stocking shelves at a grocery store during the night shift.  Of course I'm not so sure Turbo Pascal would really have been up to the tasks of today's Web 2.0 environment.

Dries Buytaert, lead of the Drupal project, invited students on his blog to participate in Google's Summer of Code and at the same time help improve the Drupal core.  This is Google's third year for the program which hopes to encourage college students to work on open source projects.  Chris Dibona, Open Source Program Manager at Google, wrote:

Last year we paid 630 students from 450 schools in 90 countries $4,500 each to work on open source software projects. These projects, selected by some 100 open source mentoring organizations from over 6,000 applications, provided students with invaluable real-world programming experience.

For the Summer of Code 2007, Google is hoping to accept an additional 200 students and add additional open source projects to its program.   I should also add that not only does the participating student collect money from Google, but participating open source projects mentoring the student will also collect $500 at the end of summer.