Joomla! Community Magazine™

GSoC 2017 was also Joomla’s 10th anniversary in the program. At the Joomla World Conference, 5 students and their mentors came together, meeting for the first time in person. The event also offered the opportunity for Students, Mentors and Admins of the program to share their experience with the program to the Global Community through a panel hosted by Nick Burch from the Apache Foundation.

More than an opportunity to find new talents for Joomla! and improve the software, Google Summe of Code, or simply put GSoC, is a big reunion of open source lovers to share, learn, teach and have fun. In 2016,year we had siz excellent student projects that were accepted by Google to be part of this program designed to encourage university student participation in open source software development. Joomla Community Magazine invited Ruchiranga Wickramasinghe to talk about his experience.

We have been sharing monthly with JCM readers the step by step of the exciting Google Summer of Code journey. Now that you already know about the developed projects and students feedback, it is time to listen to a very important group: our mentors - the brains behind the projects. 

The success of GSoC16 of joomla project opened a lot of doors for me. Here I am presenting my work with Automated Testing as BDD - Gherkin, codeception how we’ve written the test of scenarios to our project and how we helped Joomla! it through the project.

At the start of the project my proposal was to add the previous 1.x feature of Joomla of creating a menu item directly from the component view in the newer versions of Joomla. During starting weeks me and my mentors discussed what approach to take to add such functionality. The decision was to make it between using helper function or using Plugins. In my proposal I had suggested to use the plugin method using various trigger event. So it was decided to first add the functionality for only article view(On-the-fly) version, after that the functionality can be made generic using plugin. So basically the method that I proposed at starting was used to achieve the final goals.

Google Summer of Code 2016 came to an end. This article will give you a quick look at what really happened during the 3 months period and the results myself as well as our JavaScript testing team reaped out of it.

The coding period has ended but has the project reached its destination? let's find out

Google Summer of Code is now over. Amazing three months I worked with the amazing team of Joomla. Learnt a lot and had much fun. My project was “Recording Actions Logs, Accessible by Super Admin” which I wish would be a good addition to the Joomla project.

Gladly the project had a big update in these months, so let me show you! Having such a complex project in your hands can be sometimes overwhelming, managing time, defining a certain task as finished, planning further tasks is the hardest part.

Imagine if the Super User could record the actions of users: who did what, where and when. This is the extension that I am developing in my Joomla! Google Summer of Code Project.