Google Summer Of Code News & Articles

Welcome to the first installment of our new end-of-the-month look at what you can expect from open source CMS projects in the next 30 days. We're just getting started and are counting on you, our community members to help us gather the key facts.

Here's what you can expect in May 2009. To avoid playing favorites, the projects are presented in alphabetical order.

The next phase of Google's Summer of Code reveals that Google is sponsoring stipends for 18 Drupal developers. Out of this total of US$ 90,000 in stipends, US$ 4,500 goes to each of the selected student developers and US$ 500 goes to the Drupal Association or to the mentors who guide the students.

Each of the 18 students is working on a different project, including a Drupal first. The father-son team of Jim and Jimmy Berry will work on one of the projects together, bringing the idea of the Drupal family up to a new level.

For information on the 18 projects, the students behind them and the mentors, see the official Drupal announcement. Many more open source and CMS-related projects were selected for the Google Summer of Code as well, including PHP, Joomla!, Plone and others.

Since 2005, one of Google's more popular projects has been the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). The GSoC is a global program that pairs participating open source projects with student developers. Students accepted to the GSoC receive a stipend and are assigned mentors within specific projects.

The GSoC is definitely a win-win proposition for the students, who gain real world experience and the open source projects, who not only have the chance to get some key features done faster than they would otherwise, but also might gain long-time contributors from the process.

Open Source Web Content Management is well-represented in this year's list of 150 accepted projects. Mentor organizations accepted this year include Drupal, Joomla!, TikiWiki CMS/Groupware, Moodle, Plone, WordPress, Geeklog and Typo3.

Numerous related projects including wikis, foundation technologies like those provided like the Apache Software Foundation and groups such as the Creative Commons whose licenses back a lot of Web Content Management Systems's content were also included.

We’ve all worked for one of these gray, stultifying corporate monstrosities. You know the ones with caffeine-comatose zombies in suits roaming the corridors, and a place in the lobby where you check in your soul on the way in, and collect it again at 5pm.

Yes – they pay well. And yet a great many of us look with just a little bit of envy at smaller startups in interesting and innovative fields - like open source - and kinda wish that we could be in some way involved.