I was looking through the GSoC 2012 list of accepted organizations and saw that Joomla! was there too, just what I was looking for because I like PHP programming language. In order to get involved, I’ve tried to help by fixing a bug and by adding in a unit test and I was very excited when my pull request was merged.

Currently, I’m a third year Computer Science student at "Politehnica" University of Bucharest, Romania. My first programming language was Pascal, in high school, which I found old, but it was enough to raise my interest towards programming. Curious about web development, I have started learning PHP and later I have chosen this faculty with the main goal of discovering new programming languages and of perfecting my developer skills.

The project I will work on this summer for GSoC is called Social Package and is consisted of several packages, a package for each social network: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Nowadays social networks play an important role online. The number of social networks’ users is growing day by day and there are also a lot of applications interacting with social media APIs. The variety of these APIs turns into spending large amounts of time and writing a lot of code by the developers when they build applications.

Therefore, it is very useful to build a Social Package for the Joomla! Platform. The package’s main purpose is to ease the developers’ work, providing a simplified way to interact with these APIs by writing less code and in the end being more efficient.

I think that this project will help me to bind with the Joomla! Community. I would like to improve the Social Package after Google Summer of Code. In case some of the included APIs changes I am willing to make the necessary modifications and I would also like to include more social networks in the Social Package. I'm oppened to participate in other projects too.