[wp-hackers] [GSoC 2011] Introduction + questions about some of the projects

[Sagie Maoz]

Hi all,

My name is Sagie, I'm a first-year CS & linguistics student at Tel-Aviv University.
I've been a professional web developer for the last 6 years, mostly done PHP work.
I actually have a vast experience with the WordPress project, as I have used it both for personal use (and contributed a number of open-source plug-ins) and for my past jobs (where I sometimes had to work on serious tweaks to the system to allow for certain features).

I'm applying to GSoC this summer and given my experience with it and how much I like it, WordPress would be an ideal project for me and I'm very excited about this opportunity.

I wanted to ask you for your thoughts on some of the project ideas posted on the GSoC page:

* Comment Moderation
This sounds like a very useful feature and an interesting project to work on.
I was wondering if there's any more documentation on the needed work, maybe some sort of spec defining required functionality? Or should I work on one myself as part of the task?
I'm especially interested about what's required for the XML-RPC side.

* New User Walkthrough
Again, sounds very cool but I think I need to know more about what you guys were thinking of with this one.
Also, is this a full summer project? Because it seems smaller than all the other ones.

* Progress Bars
To plan for this feature, I'd need to know:
- What exactly is the list of functions where the progress bar should be embedded?
- In these functions, is there an indication from the server side on progress completed? Is development of that needed, or do we just "guestimate" on the UI side?

* Enhanced Emails
Certainly sounds like it's time for such a feature, but questions arise:
- Are the e-mail message designs customized as part of the theme?
- How to handle remote image elements? This could be a tough problem.
For example, IIRC to avoid Gmail's auto-hiding of such images, one has to identify the originating domain name with some CNAME record. How can we solve that on a platform level?

* Super-Accessible Admin
Another very important feature to implement. I think collaboration with UI and accessibility groups is crucial for this to have best results. I was wondering if you have a link to a best-practice example for such accessible admin dashboard, so I could wrap my head around what needs to be done.

Sorry for the length of this, I guess that's a result of my excitement about the WP project :)
Would love to get your thoughts and directions.
Thanks,

-- 
Your friend in time,
Sagie Maoz
sagie at maoz.info // +1 (347) 556.5044 // +972 (52) 834-3339
http://sagie.maoz.info/ http://n0nick.net/

/* simba says roar! */