Every year, I find it an honor when I'm asked by open source projects to announce that they have entered been accepted as mentoring organizations into Google's Summer of Code program. I'm a big advocate of college education and I also understand the importance of a summer job to keeping those college bills under control. Open source projects and the Google Summer of Code provides this opportinuty for upcoming software developers. The Summer of Code is a "global program sponsored by Google that offers post-secondary student developers ages 18 and older stipends to write code for various open source software projects".

There are several goals to the Google Summer of Code program:

1. Create and release open source code for the benefit of all
2. Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development
3. Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers
4. Provide students the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits (think "flip bits, not burgers")
5. Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., distributed development, software licensing questions, mailing-list etiquette)

The Summer of Code program provides college age students with alternatives to the typical summer employment at the local grocery store or fast food chain with an opportinity to work the code and on projects that inspires them the most. Google will provide a stipend of $5500 USD per accepted student developer, of which $5000 USD goes to the student and $500 USD goes to the mentoring organization.

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.

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.

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

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.

"Robert Douglass, Angie Byron, and Jeff Robbins take a look at the outcome of the various Drupal Summer of Code projects."

Complete Story and Podcast

"It's been almost two weeks since the 2006 Summer of Code began, and with it, my work to develop an import / export API module for Drupal. In case you missed it, my work is being documented on this wiki. My latest code is now also available as a project on drupal.org. Since I've barely started, I think that this is a stupid time to sit back and reflect on what I've done so far. But I'm doing it anyway."