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Summer 2021 of Open Source Promotion Plan

June-Summer2021

The GSoC department is excited to inform the Joomla community of our successful application to be a mentor organization for the “Summer 2021 of Open Source Promotion Plan” with the Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Joomla is regularly looking for opportunities that can help us with achieving development goals through engaging with students via open-source project programs. Over the years, participants in GSoC have gone on to become valued long-term members of the community.

As GSoC 2021 moves into the student bonding phase, a new program "Summer 2021 of Open Source Promotion Plan" was brought to the team's attention by Harald Leithner. On our first application to join the program, Joomla has been accepted as a participating project

As this is our first time with the new project we have decided to keep the project slots to a manageable level and went for three. Fortunately, we were provided with the three slots we asked for. More details can be found here but the summary of the projects is as follows:

Guided Tour

This project will create a guided tour inside Joomla! A tour is a click-through path which the user can follow to fulfil certain tasks like creating an article. So on the one hand Joomla! core should deliver basic tours for users to use core functionality without the need to read the documentation. On the other hand, it should be possible to create their own tours (e.g. as administrators for system operators), copy and change existing tours or allow 3rd party developers to ship their own tours when their extension will be installed.

Website Cron Job

The goal of this project is to implement a pseudo-cron job implementation so admins can set up cron jobs that are triggered by visitors. Extensions can create cron job plugins which then integrate into the cron job extension and can be set up and timed by the site admin. Also, a CLI integration should be part of the project. Additionally, the extension should be able to manage server cron jobs directly if they are available.

Health Check

It is always important to have an overview of the status of your system. Currently, important information is spread over the whole system and sometimes it’s hard to find the needed status information or information is missing. So an information page with all information would be very helpful for the site administrator, especially if 3rd party developers can also push status information for their installed extension there too.

We have more programs planned throughout the year and it is hoped that it will develop into a rolling program constantly nourishing and supporting Joomla with new enthusiasm and volunteers, and they, in turn, will learn from the collective experience of the Joomla community.

This is my first assignment as Team Lead. I was nervous and excited at the same time but the endless support from Benjamin Trenkle and Philip Walton among others has helped me. Without their support, it won’t have been possible.

We now have one big problem in the Google Summer of Code Joomla Team, what to call ourselves. We are certainly not exclusively GSoC anymore. Perhaps the “Student Engagement, Education and Development team”. Just planting the SEED of an idea, will be great to see how far it can grow.

A second problem is that as we get involved with more programs, we'll need more mentors. For GSoC this year, two experienced mentors have been paired with two new members of the community. Going forward, we hope this model is able to expand the future number of mentors across multiple projects.

We're also looking forward to participating in many other programs. If you're aware of any that are coming up or have contacts with organizations that might run programs that we should have on our radar, please also reach out to let us know about the opportunities available.

If you would like to get involved in a mentorship role or know of other projects Joomla should look to participate in, please contact the team via This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or message me, Shivam Rajput on Joomla's RingCentral (Glip) and we'll connect with you more to place you in a future project.

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