[dokuwiki] [GSoC 2011] Advice/Guidance required for a newbie open source developer. Project idea for Remote API.
- From: Kaushik Subramanian <humantorch.shadowsin@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2011 14:00:09 +0530
Hey guys,
My name is Kaushik and I'm an engineering student from India. I've been
following Dokuwiki's development for over a couple of weeks now and I'm
interested in contributing to Dokuwiki through GSoC 2011.
Firstly, I'm a total beginner to opensource development. I've been trying to
get involved with some projects on google project hosting, when I bumped
into GSoC. I think it's a great platform for students like me to learn and
gain some experience working with real-life software development
communities. Though, I seem to be getting immense help from the IRC channel
and the mailing list archives, there are a lot of basic/beginner questions I
have and I hope these can be answered. Please bear with me, cause my doubts
might be a little too trivial.
Being a complete stranger to opensource development, I'm only now getting
exposed to using git, building repositories, communicating over IRC, reading
the entire software manual to understand its core etc. I'll be honest in
saying that I'm not very clear on how this works, but hopefully with your
guidance I might be able to get somewhere!
I'm going to attempt to break down my skills so that you can understand
better on how I should be guided.
My Technical Skills:
1.Good knowledge of HTML, XML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, and AJAX
2. I've been a web developer for about 8 years now and I also have
experience "using" CMS softwares like Joomla and wikis like mediawiki.
3. I've spent most of my time building websites, buying domain names and
selling webspace. Only recently my interest has started to deviate towards
opensource development and web applications.
4. I have a knack for coding. I built a c++ game of othello with a computer
oponent and a basic UI.
5. I'am an eager learner and my objective is to successfully contribute my
talent to DokuWiki and at the same time gain knowledge and experience. The
GSoC page talks about introducing new students to opensource development,
and I believe I fall under that category.
I work on a windows OS and use Chrome for a browser. That's pretty much
where I stand.
I got introduced to dokuwiki very recently, but I'm already intrigued by
it's potential and simplicity. The idea of storing pages as simple text
files makes data storage such a simple process. Now, for the past two weeks
I've just been doing a lot of reading (The manual, the developers wiki, GIT
tutorials). Till now, I've successfully managed to install DokuWiki on my
local server and I also have GIT bash running (Though I'm still struggling
with the commands and understanding commits etc), and I'm playing around a
little with my installation. I haven't touched any part of the code yet,
since I still haven't understood Dokuwiki's core and I am clueless as to how
changes can be made/implemented or even where to begin??? I'm obviously
going through a lot of tutorials, but reading itself seems to be taking up
most of my time!
I'll try and be a bit more specific if it helps you in telling me which
would be a good startpoint. I've chosen one of the proposed project ideas
and I wish to pursue it.
Project Idea I'm interested in:
Remote API - Implementing an interface to push blogs from a dokuwiki
installation to external blogsites or social media websites [Multiple
clients/websites would be provided as options]. The new pubsubhubbub
protocol developed by google looks promising and might be useful in
achieving our goals and more ( Instantaneous indexing by Google search, and
picked up by other services, such as Google Reader, Netvibes, FriendFeed,
and many others. http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/ . This protocol is
already used by wordpess in an important plugin release -
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pushpress/
I came across another plugin used in wordpress -
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facepress-ii/ . Would that be helpful to
our project? And my question is - wouldn't the interface have to be built
client specific? As in, depending upon which client or website the post is
being pushed to??
My status:
1.I'm trying to familiarize myself with the XML-RPC interface. How do you
think I can better understand this?
2. Which is the best startpoint for understanding this project better?
3. In the past 2 weeks, I really haven't done any coding as such cause I've
been wholly confused with dokuwiki's structure and using git. If someone can
make this whole process simpler and break it down for me?
4. Is there any dev tool you guys use to edit the php, xml codes?
I'm extremely interested in being a part of this project, whether I'm
selected as a GSoC participant or not. I'm more keen on learning and
educating myself as to how things work and how I can be a successful
opensource developer. So, if anyone could answer all/some of my questions,
that would be great! :)
Looking forward to working with you guys on this idea,
Cheers,
Kaushik
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