Google's Summer of Code 2006

Django (and the Lawrence Journal-World) is a sponsoring organization for the ​2006 Google Summer of Code. (Read Google's page for more information on how the program works.)

Mentors

If you're interesting in mentoring -- supervising a student in work on Django-related activities -- ​sign up over at Google and then add your name below:

Students

Student applications opened May 1st; ​sign up over at Google and be sure to list Django as the project you want to work with.

If you'd like to get started on your proposal early, we'll be looking for a few things. You'll need to have a concrete task in mind (some ideas are below) along with a solid idea of what will constitute "success" (you tell us). We'll want to know a bit about you -- links to previous work are great, if any. You'll also need to provide us with a rough schedule of milestones so your mentor can know if and when to nag you :)

Note that none of the ideas below are good enough to be submissions in their own right (so don't copy and paste)! We'll want to know not just what you want to do but how you plan to pull it off.

And don't feel limited to the ideas below -- if you've got a cool project you want to work on, we'll probably be able to find you a mentor. We plan on approving as many projects as we possibly can.

Note: we're looking for projects that add value to Django itself - not application/CMS projects that use Django.

Ideas

Here are some suggestions for projects students may want to propose (lazyweb: please add to this list!). This isn't by any means the be-all and end-all of ideas; please feel free to submit proposals for things not on this list.

Try to scope ideas/proposals to the 4-month timeline -- simply proposing to fix a ticket or two will probably result in your proposal being rejected in favor of a more ambitious one. The SOC does not cover activities other than coding, so certain ideas ("Write a more detailed tutorial" or "Create demonstration screencasts" or "Add a pony") are not suitable for inclusion here.

  • Build a public repository for reusable Django applications. This probably includes:
    • a standard way of packaging Django apps for distribution
    • infrastructure for automatically downloading and installing packaged Django apps.
  • Create a generic, reusable search/indexer component (capable of htmlentities).
  • Enhance the admin's support of rich media:
    • richtextfield using tinymce integrated with file explorer mentioned below
    • create a file explorer for MEDIA_ROOT in the admin: browsing and making directories, uploading files
    • automatically make thumbnails from ImageFields (with programmable "PIL modes" (i.e. adding borders, overlaying png's))
    • validation of image type, sizes, etc
    • support for uploading large files through the admin with a pretty progress indicator
  • Change the permissions system to be more flexible (ACL's, Zope-style role based authorization, etc.)

  • Refactor package settings so things like django.template are usable outside of django. ​details

  • A better built-in webserver and an officially supported methodology to connect to lighttpd and similar servers.
  • Implement a set of reusable AJAX components using Dojo and Django as a backend, including:
    • Non-admin widgets
    • Admin widgets to bring Django closer to, e.g., MicrosoftAccess (NB: if Django ever becomes anything LIKE Access, I'm leaving. -- JKM) for creating database applications:
      • MultiSelectComboBox that works for thousands of rows and can display multi-column results
      • Easily create any levels of in-lined editing widgets
      • Compose admin pages of AjaxPortlets that can be connected together
  • add dabbledb (​http://dabbledb.com/utr/) like functionality to the django admin. e.g. create a project and super user with one command line statement, fire up the development web server, and import/create/refine your model using live data from directly within the django auto admin.
  • Build a complete sample application similar to the ones which are shipped with java and .net. This server should be built as a showcase for other people to learn how to implement django features. (mysql's Sakila DVD rental app and the Java Pet Store app are two good ideas)
  • A Row/Object level authorisation system. so you can say 'User A has read- access to customer 123' and user B has write access to customer 123', and user C has read/write to customer 345
  • An option in the model to keep a copy of past states of rows/objects that have been modified. If this option is set, it becomes possible in the admin to see a diff between two past states of an object and get back to a past state of an object.
  • Multiple database support so that applications can be spread over different DBs.

Smaller ideas

The ideas listed below are (as-is) too small in scope for a summer project. If one of them catches your eye, think of ways of expanding it slightly before applying.

  • Create Django packages and buildscripts for Linux (various), FreeBSD (There already is one www/py-django), OS X (Fink and Darwinports), etc.
  • Make something like models.RequestModel allowing to pass request to the model, so it would be possible to access the current user etc. from the model, the admin should be made to pass request if the model inherits from models.RequestModel

  • Add spell checking to CharField and TextField with a well thought out interface (getting the interface right will be significantly harder than the backend code).
  • Implement custom redirects and field templates for the admin system.
  • Parametrized templates. Currently the only way to use the content of another template in a place that does not contain blocks is to include it. But that includes the whole template. It would be very nice if one could include blocks defined in other templates to be evaluated in a certain context. (this turned out to be harder to explain than I thought, basically what I'm saying is to introduce a new kind of block that works like a function, where you could call/import a block and pass it some parameters)
  • Code a themeable generic theme (or two) for use in people's Django applications.
Last modified 18 years ago Last modified on May 24, 2006, 11:52:28 PM

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