Summer of Code 2010

Welcome to Dreamwidth!

An Introduction to Dreamwidth Development

If you're totally new to Dreamwidth, you can find out more about us by reading our Guiding Principles, our Diversity Statement, and our About Us guide. We're a blogging platform and social network, forked in 2008 from the code originally developed by LiveJournal.com and considerably extended. We've developed a strong mentoring program that has brought dozens of new programmers into the world of open source, and we'd love to include you as a part of that.

Getting started in Dreamwidth development is documented in the 'Category:Development' category on this Wiki. We offer free hosted development environments, if you don't have to install the server code yourself, so you can get straight to hacking, or if you prefer, you can install from scratch. (Our system documentation being perpetually behind, we really do recommend that you use our hosted development environment service, but if you prefer to install to your own space, we'll give you as much of a hand as you need -- we have many available mentors who are used to doing a step-by-step install.)

As a project, we have a pretty well-developed network of mentoring, coaching, and tutoring, so if you aren't already involved in Dreamwidth development, our first step will be to introduce you to our development community. We're a close-knit team full of lots of enthusiasm! You'll be assigned an official mentor as part of the Google Summer of Code program, but everyone on the project will be available to answer questions, walk you through things, or give you a few tips and hints.

You can browse or download our code at our Mercurial repositories: the dw-free branch is the branch where main development happens, while the other branches are backend utilities or site-specific branding. Technical and development discussion takes place on Dreamwidth itself: dw_dev for general development discussion, dw_dev_training for questions, tips, and useful tricks, and changelog for our project changelog. (There's also dw_news for general site announcements.)

If you'd like an account creation code for Dreamwidth, so you can explore the site, just email Denise (denise@dreamwidth.org) or Mark (mark@dreamwidth.org), the project owners.

Summer of Code Project Ideas

This page serves as a beginning ideas list for the Google Summer of Code project -- it isn't the sole list of projects that might interest a new developer who's looking for a summer-long project, but it's a list of things that we think are fairly standalone and would work well as modular projects. If you don't see something here to strike your fancy, you might also want to look over our unassigned 'effort-major' bugs, or our list of unassigned user suggestions. (Or, if you're already a Dreamwidth user and have an idea for something in particular you want to work on, we'd love to hear about it.)

Most of these ideas are flexible -- so you'll have lots of leeway no matter what you choose. Still, if you're interested in a more self-guided experience, you might want to choose something that's less specified, while if you're the type who prefers to work to a spec, you should pick a project that has a functional spec written. (Or, if you're really interested in a project that doesn't have a functional spec yet, but you work better with one, just let us know. We'll get you one.)

Likewise, if you want to work on a project that has both backend and frontend elements, but you're only interested in the backend bits, come talk to us before you write your proposal, and we'll see what we can work out. We may be able to find you a partner who can work with you on frontend presentation.

Some of these projects are more standalone than others -- we've marked the ones that are more tied in to how the site's culture works, or things we think might require significant user input. Those projects would be a good choice for someone who's interested in getting experience gathering, working with, and incorporating end-user feedback. (We'll do as much of the end-user communication for you as you'd like, or we'll coach and guide you through the process if you'd like to get experience doing it yourself. You can check the dw_biz and dw_suggestions communities for some examples of our user feedback.)

Project:

Description:

Code area to look at:

Difficulty level:

Skills needed:

Spec available:

Mentor help needed:

Clients & Protocols

LiveJournal has always had, and Dreamwidth would like to have as well, desktop or mobile applications that connect to the web site and allow you to write posts or do other actions that normally you need the site to do. One of our most requested features is for the ability to use the site without having to access it via a web browser.

This is a fairly broad category. It would be a valid project to do a mobile client (iPhone, Android, etc), or similarly, one for the desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux). We've made several changes to the LiveJournal client protocol in order to update it, as we've proceeded along our fork, so many of the existing LiveJournal clients work imperfectly for Dreamwidth, or not at all. We'd love to have a set of DW-native clients.

Likewise, we'd love to implement some more of the more widely popular standard blogging APIs: Blogger, MetaWeblog, Atom, etc, as part of our drive towards interoperability. We'd love to hear your ideas on any of these.

Here are some sample clients & protocols projects:

Project: Desktop client

Description: Program a downloadable client (for the platform of your choice) that will allow users to interact with their journal remotely, without needing a web browser. Ideally, a client program will allow users to post entries to their journal, read their "reading page", and manage the settings of their account (to the extent available through the protocol), but at a bare minimum, the client program should allow the user to post entries to their journal.

Code area to look at: The LiveJournal client protocol contains all of the functions you'd need to implement.

Difficulty level: Medium

Skills needed: Desktop software development, proficiency in application language of your choice

Spec available: No formal spec, but the LiveJournal download page contains examples of client programs written for LiveJournal. Clients written for Dreamwidth should function in roughly the same way.

Mentor help needed: Your mentor will help guide you through the client protocol -- specifically, the changes Dreamwidth has made to the LiveJournal client protocol -- and help you to determine what further changes need to be made to the client protocol to best serve client authors. (There are also several LiveJournal client authors who have expressed interest in adapting their clients to work with Dreamwidth.)

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Project: Mobile client

Description: Program a mobile/handheld client (for the platform of your choice -- we're particularly interested in an iPhone application, but any mobile platform would be awesome) that will allow users to interact with their journal through their mobile device. Ideally, a client program will allow users to post entries to their journal, read their "reading page", and manage the settings of their account (to the extent available through the protocol), but at a bare minimum, the client program should allow the user to post entries to their journal.

Code area to look at: The LiveJournal client protocol contains all of the functions you'd need to implement.

Difficulty level: Medium

Skills needed: Mobile platform software development, proficiency in the mobile programming language of your choice

Spec available: No formal spec, but the LiveJournal download page contains examples of client programs written for LiveJournal. Clients written for Dreamwidth should function in roughly the same way.

Mentor help needed: Your mentor will help guide you through the client protocol -- specifically, the changes Dreamwidth has made to the LiveJournal client protocol -- and help you to determine what further changes need to be made to the client protocol to best serve client authors.

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Project: API Extension

Description: In addition to the existing LiveJournal protocol, implement and integrate one (or more) additional open blogging APIs: Blogger, MetaWeblog, Atom, etc.

Code area to look at: The LiveJournal protocol is where the existing protocol lives -- all transactions with the site go through the protocol, even web-based transactions. Additional APIs would need to be implemented in a way that would tie in to the existing protocol.

Difficulty level: Medium

Skills needed: Backend programming knowledge, Perl, familiarity with chosen API

Spec available: No Dreamwidth-specific spec, but the specs for various APIs are widely available.

Mentor help needed: Your mentor will answer questions about the existing client protocol and help you make decisions about how to translate other APIs' features to Dreamwidth's feature set.

Photo/Media Hosting

This project would involve adding photo hosting service to our site functionality. The interesting parts of this project are in the scalability problems of storing and serving up millions of photos, plus learning how to do all of those tricks like pulling out EXIF data, rotating, resizing, etc.

If you've a passion for digital media and want to learn about making scalable web sites, this might be a really good project.

OAuth/OpenID/Open Social/etc

The Internet is a big place. There are a lot of opportunities to implement things that will allow us to connect with other sites out there. Facebook Connect, Google's Open Social, various sites that support OAuth and OpenID, etc.

We have some ideas on what we'd like to see, but we'd love to hear yours.

Calendar System

The site would really benefit from the ability for people to schedule events. There are some unique constraints to a calendaring system on Dreamwidth, notably around the security options we provide our users. We'd want to build a system that supported iCal formats at least and could work with various calendaring solutions (online and mobile devices).