Hope everyone had an awesome summer.  I had an awesome time participating in GSoC this year.  It was a very different experience, and even though there was no office or faces to connect with, the experience was valuable and unique.   My project initially set out to orient new users to WordPress, and though the final result is not quite a LinkedIn-esque setup completion bar, I sincerely believe the result maintains and accomplishes the overreaching goal.  There were a lot of rewrites that took place over the course of development, and ultimately I learned that each “task” had to be treated individually.  There were a lot of factors considered while developing, and they included:

• keeping the code reliable for future WP updates
• drawing productive commonalities between tasks
• integrating with an existing system in the least invasive, most straightforward way

Never before had I integrated with such a wide-reaching system.  My background is mostly 3D game development, and whereas game development tends to be esoteric and isolated, changes made to WPress must be neatly encapsulated and play nice with the rest of the system as well as foreseeable 3rd party components.  I learned a lot about stepping through design decisions carefully and thinking about them in an iterative context.  Even though web development is much more focused on stability and accounting for a variety of end-user environments/contexts, you still ultimately need to code something (that’s the iterative part).  As a result of working with my mentor, Mark Jaquith, I am now enjoying David Allen’s Getting Things Done (http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280).  I am happy to have started developing for WordPress, which was a goal I had prior to GSoC and which also served as the impetus for getting involved.  Thank you to everyone else involved

EDIT: I have posted a more in-depth Post Mortem on my page which I will update soon-ish: http://gsoc2010.wordpress.com/mike-whitfield-setup-meter/

Here’s a video below of the work completed.  Please note that the mic I recorded with could not pick up sound well, so the volume is low.

For BuddyPress, you need both bp custom posts and eventpress. Add both to the plugins folder.

If you also want to try the debugger, add kb_debug.php directly to mu-plugins.

http://kunal-b.in/0.1/eventpress.tar.gz

http://kunal-b.in/0.1/bp_custom_posts.tar.gz

http://kunal-b.in/0.1/kb_debug.tar.gz

I’ll get around to updating http://kunal-b.in/eventpress/ with more details in some time.
For

And this doesn’t mean that that’s all with it – it is just ready to live, to use and to have fun : )

So you are welcome on my Finished Project page.

I’m ready for final evaluation.

Most of the functionality is mainly there though, and the UI is passable. Perhaps not quite production ready, but it’s usable. I didn’t get around to working on updating the AJAX callbacks for the threaded comments, so editing or replying to child messages will cause the whole table row to be overwritten with a single flat comment. That’s the only glaring omission though.

GSoC is almost over, so it’s time for a little summary of my project: I have managed to submit about 75 patches (might be a little more if counting partial patches). This exceeds a little my project goal set at the beginning, so I can say that my project was finished successfully The number of “has-patch” tickets has significantly increased and now it’s time for my summer trip:
Click for a bigger map
When I come back in September, I’ll still be around and hope to keep contributing to the WordPress project. Thanks for the last two months, guys!

I’m doing also lot of documentation these days, features should be ok.

A testable version of bp-album with gsoc features is in the wild, it’s still not stable but the part I’ve added as gsoc proj is almost good, some other parts need fixes/rewriting. Finally near to a stable release.

Instead bp-moderation is pretty much ready for being released, first testers have appreciated it and I just finished writing the documentation on integration with other content types. Still some doc and checking and I’ll release it.

Good luck everyone!

I hope everyone gets the chance to finish what they set out to do. Good luck!