Updates were posted here: http://gsoc2009wp.wordpress.com/
Howdy Students! Please see our GSoC 2008 Application Template
If you have your own idea for a project, include it in your application.
Know you want to propose a project around WordPress, but aren't sure what you want to do? Below are a few ideas we think would work well as GSoC projects. Also see the popular ideas submitted by members of the WordPress community. If you share one of their passions, why not make that idea your own? Also, check out the ideas from last year.
Mentors: Andy Peatling, Jake Spurlock
BuddyPress is a set of plugins for WordPress MU (regular WordPress version coming soon) that turns a WordPress blog into a social network. Since BuddyPress is still so new, there are infinite project possibilities, and we're interested in any proposals that involve extending BuddyPress.
Mentors: Andrew Ozz, Mark Jaquith, Noel Jackson
In the coming months, the WordPress media handling functions will be redesigned, with new features added and significant recoding of existing features. There will be many components to the media overhaul, any of which could make a great Summer of Code project. We'll be looking to add things like slideshows, better gallery functions, creating more user settings for media files and templates, maybe a Gears uploader, and dozens of other features that could be packaged up for SoC projects.
Mentors: Alex Shiels, Beau Lebens, Nick Momrik, Thorsten Ott
Importing and exporting blog content is an important function within WordPress. Create a WordPress import/export process that doesn’t need a file, but connects directly to the blog for the content transfer instead.
Mentor: Mark Jaquith
The WordPress roles/capabilities system could use an upgrade. The current system is a little clunky, and is missing key functionality such as the ability to limit an author to a specific category, setting permissions for viewing/altering/moderating content (currently very basic), and on the back end it is hard to query for "users who have capability X" etc.
Mentors: Thorsten Ott, Beau Lebens
WordPress saves post revisions, but changes to theme files are not recorded, though the presentation layer is sometimes just as important. Build a versioning system for template files within the theme editor.
Mentor: Ryan Boren
MPTT (Modified Pre-order Tree Transversal) for pages and categories would make displaying hierarchical data much faster and would allow WordPress to scale better for blogs with lots of pages or categories.
Mentors: Mike Adams, Joseph Scott, Demitrious Kelly
The current search included with WordPress is fairly basic (both the blog element and the admin element). Build an advanced search to allow searching by multiple metadata selections (ex: posts in category A with tags B and C; posts with author A and "text string;" plugins with keywords A and B, version compatibility C.)
Mentors: Thorsten Ott, Hailin Wu
Enhance the WordPress Video Solution Framework. Possibly add features such as related videos in player, screenshot capture on preview, eventually advertisement overlays, etc.
Mentor: Nick Momrik, Thorsten Ott
It's been said that 2009 will be the year of the theme. Possible projects in this area could include things like creating a new theme framework for inclusion as a default theme, or putting together a set of plugins with a theme framework to make use-specific packages like BuddyPress is for social networking... projects could do the same for event planning, CMS, education/online learning, media-based sites (using WordPress.tv as test case), etc.
Mentors: Andy Peatling, Sam Bauers, Jane Wells
Create a suite of plugins for event planning, tie it into WordPress MU/BuddyPress/bbPress, and create a community organizing platform for open source release. Using WordCamp.org as the test case, the resulting site would include functionality for registration, calendaring, additional roles/permissions, extended profiles, directories (vendors, participants, etc), discussion and messaging, coordination around things like carpooling and planning meetings, event media, etc.
Mentor: Beau Lebens, Mark Jaquith, TBA
Lots of things could be done around the multi-user version of WordPress. Some ideas include improving functionality for domain mapping, adding a management system for multi-site MU installs, global tags pages, making MU work with "www" domains, and tracking spammers and junk blogs (especially in signups).
Additional members from the WordPress open source community may be added based on project needs.