h0bbel.p0ggel.org

Over the last few days, most of the Gallery developers has been doing a 'Gx Coding Sprint' in Google's Mountain View location. The purpose of the sprint was to reach an agreement on the road ahead, and to get started on the new version of Gallery.

Sadly I was not able to attend, but they seem to have managed fine without me (No surprises there)! So far, Bharat has outlined the road ahead in a Gallery-Devel thread. Read the whole thing for the details, but the gist of it is this:

• Name: Gallery 3 (surprise!)
• Framework: Kohana
• Supported Environment: LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL 5, PHP 5)

Basically this comes down to acknowledging that Gallery 2 has become to large and to all-embracing to be effective at what it does. Gallery 3 will try to rectify this.

While I have no experience with Kohana at all, I'm really looking forward to working on this. It promises to be a lot of fun and I hope to be able to really contribute to making Gallery 3 a huge success. Now, lets get a fully functional external API ready and I'll try to make sure that there is a Habari Silo available for it as well.
After all, the Silo's look great and does a fantastic job when publishing content.

I've made a new small plugin for Habari available, the jTagEditor plugin. This plugin makes the create content section use Jay Salvat's jTagEditor as a simple editor for creating/editing content.

Upcoming changes will be to use the full version of jTagEditor, instead of the current lite version. The plugin currently includes some files that only the full version will make use of, so consider this an interim version.

To be able to use the plugin, your Habari install need to be running SVN revision 919 or newer as Owen added some needed stack calls to admin section.

I've been playing around with creating a couple of very small Habari plugins lately and it's great fun as well as good PHP experience. So far the only thing that has been made public is a Technorati plugin that fetches your incoming link count, incoming blog count and rank and displays them on the Habari admin dashbord.

This has made me come up with a few other plugin concepts I would like to see implemented in Habari:

• Email Notification
  A plugin that notifies you, via email, for pre-defined events on your install. It could be comments, posts and other events from the internal Activity log.
• Twitter
  A plugin that allows you to have your own Twitter admin panel inside the Habari admin. The plugin would allow you to post directly to Twitter, automatically post new content from your site to Twitter (I use twitterfeed for this now) and view your own/your friends timelines
• Google Calendar
  This would let you configure a Google Calendar to automatically receive new content from your site. New posts, comments etc. would be placed in a predefined Google Calendar for easy timeline tracking
• Data Insert
  There are lot of services around that wants you to integrate their code into your own theme. Examples are Google Analytics, ReInvigorate etc. A plugin that provides an interface where you can copy'n'paste the service code directly into some portion of your site, like in the header or footer, would make it easier to put these code snippets where they belong. This would also mean that the data gets inserted regardless of which theme you use.

I might try and do some of these myself, but if someone else out there gets a sudden urge to implement any of these I would be very happy!

The Gallery team has posted an updated ideas page for the Google Summer of Code 2007 as welll as a call for more applications. I am sure lots of you out there have great ideas on how to improve Gallery 2, and now would be the perfect time to help the Gallery team to improving the product, AND get paid for it!

Google has extended the student application deadline to 5:00 PM PDT on Monday, March 26, 2007, so if you are eligible get cranking on your application and submit it. Help is make Gallery even better than it is already!

Google Summer of Code 2007 is on, and the mentoring organizations has now been selected. Gallery pleased to be amongst the accepted organizations this year too, along side a list of fine Open Source projects.

Get cranking on those student applications, it's a great way to earn some extra cash over the summer as well as a excellent way to get started with Open Source application development and culture.