GSOC 2013

We are participating in GSOC 2013 (if we're accepted, that is!)

How do I apply as a student?

Well, we need to be accepted as a mentoring org first :)

But then:

• Submit your application (details coming soon)
• Join us on IRC and on our mailing lists.
• Set up a development environment via our HackingHowto

It's important that you communicate... most MediaGoblin communication happens on IRC, so you should join us there and discuss (#mediagoblin on irc.freenode.net)!

Possible projects

Here are a list of projects that students may wish to apply for for GSOC 2013:

Blogging system

We've had an increasing number of people ask if MediaGoblin would be a useful plugin system. The answer is that at present, it isn't: even though we support an ascii art media type, media types aren't really the right way to handle blogging since they don't really fit with the "gallery" style of editing things in MediaGoblin.

But people are interested in something that's more along the lines of Tumblr: a blogging platform with good media embedding integration. In many ways, MediaGoblin is perfect for this!

Some thoughts:

• Blogs might go at /u/foo-user/b/ and individual blogposts at /u/foo-user/b/blogpost-slug/
• Blogging should be a plugin
• HTML with something like TinyMCE integration would be good. HTML would need to be cleaned on the backend.
• Maybe other types would be allowed (markdown, restructured text) though I'm not sure how much more complex that makes cleaning HTML output.
• What about commenting? Would we need a seaparate comments table?

Document / presentation system

There's some work toward a document type in MediaGoblin, but to get a *really nice* document type, it might take some work.

• Conversion from various documents to PDF via libreoffice on the backend
• On-page reading with pdf.js
• Preservation of original file, with ability to download
• Other things???

Pluggable user authentication & implementations

We'd like a pluggable user authentication module. Some people want to use things like LDAP. Some people would also like BrowserID integration.

With our new work toward pluginification it would be good to see the structure for user authentication to be interface'ified. It would also be good to have implementation for several types of logins such as BrowserID, LDAP, and central authentication system stuff.