In case anyone has forgotten the timelin…

In case anyone has forgotten the timeline, here’s what’s left:

July 6 (today!): Mentors and students can begin submitting mid-term evaluations.

July 13: Mid-term evaluations deadline; Google begins issuing mid-term student payments provided passing student survey is on file. Note: WordPress mentors are expected to submit final evaluations no later than July 10, so that we will have time to resolve any issues before the 13th.

Interim Period: Mentors give students a helping hand and guidance on their projects.

August 10: Suggested ‘pencils down’ date. Take a week to scrub code, write tests, improve documentation, etc.

August 17: Firm ‘pencils down’ date. Mentors, students and organization administrators can begin submitting final evaluations to Google.

August 24: Final evaluation deadline; Google begins issuing student and mentoring organization payments provided forms and evaluations are on file.

August 25: Final results of GSoC 2009 announced.

September 3: Students can begin submitting required code samples to Google.

**There is about a month until the pencils down date.**

Hi everyone. As you know, this is midter…

Hi everyone. As you know, this is midterm week. Evaluations begin today and will be finalized by the 13th. You may recall from the very first post on this blog that there were three basic expectations of everyone:
1. Work directly with your mentor to define your plan of action and begin executing it;
2. Post an update at least weekly on this blog; and the big one,
3. “It’s expected by the halfway point for you to have a functioning plugin/code that works. The second half of the summer will be spend refining and integrating your work so that by the end of the summer, it is release-ready. For some this will mean scaling back their projects; be realistic when you nail down the final scope of your projects with your mentors.”

Your mentors will be evaluating you on the quality of your code and how well you met the above-mentioned expectations in relation to your project proposals and/or revised project plans from the first interim period. Here’s what Google says about evaluations:

How do evaluations work?

Google will pre-publish the evaluation questions for both students and mentors. Mentors will fill out mid-term and final evaluations for their students via the Google Summer of Code 2009 site. These evaluations will be visible in the system to the mentor and the mentoring organization’s administrator(s). Students will fill out a mid-term and final evaluation of their mentors online as well, and their evaluations will only be visible in the system to the mentoring organization’s administrator(s). Program administrators from Google will have access to all evaluation data.

In almost all cases, students will never see their mentor’s evaluation of their progress, nor will a mentor see a student’s evaluation of her/his mentorship. However, in the case where the mentoring organization’s administrator and a student’s mentor are one and the same, the student’s evaluation will be shared with the mentor. Organization administrators are expected to review mid-term and final evaluations and to provide course corrections where necessary.

In some cases, Google’s program administrators may need to share the results of evaluations with the student and mentor, such as to arbitrate when payment should not be made; should this need arise, all parties will be notified in advance.

The evaluation links on the GSoC site should go live today.

Ok, Here is the update. I`ll be soon p…

Ok,

Here is the update.

I`ll be soon posting a link to the very early dev version of Buildpress (need to confirm with Mr.Andrew).
The latest updates include

working Create New Theme (with the Buildpress Builder UI)

• features 8 differnt types of layouts (2 cols, 3cols with 2 fully widgetized sidebars + Top and Bottom Banners)
• 3 types of page size (viz fixed 750px, 950px and liquid – 100%)
• Customizable Fonts, colors and sizes (for the demo only h1,h2,h3,p are featured). More customizations will be included.

Completely AJAX powered,

• working Delete Theme action
• working Activate Theme action

The “Buildpress Builder” which is the UI that will help create layouts, has 2 panels viz Panel-1 = layout of the theme, Panel-2 = Cosmetics of the theme. (currently the panels are populated with just test variables, you can play with em :))

Buildpress uses the WP options table instead of an own table to store individual theme settings. This will help it perform much faster since the options are autoloaded at start of WP.

I am currently working on a bit of the cosmetics for rendering themes. Will post a link soon 🙂

Finally, some code in time for the deadl…

Finally, some code in time for the deadline.

• MPTT Categories Patch

That patch, once applied, should prompt you for a database upgrade, automatically populate the tree with the necessary data, and use some new methods to take advantage of MPTT to display the category list (full and paged). If there are any bugs, please let me know, as I’ve only been able to test it under the conditions of my controlled environment (XAMPP for Linux).

For large numbers of categories (several hundred to a few thousand), I see a fairly consistent speedup of 8-10% with my set-up. Currently, it only works for displaying the data in the order it is stored in. Ryan and I decided that the best way to do that would be in order by name. Oddly enough, it would seem that using PHP5’s strcmp() to do the ordering produces a slightly different order than MySQL’s ORDER BY. Namely, you get the natural number ordering that Windows was so proud of a few years back (i.e. 80 comes before 100).

It still needs some polish, for instance the MPTT_Walker class still uses the old paged_walk() method, but since this seems to be used for comments only, I’m waiting until I handle those. Other things like that are scattered around. Also I still need to convert cat_rows() to be iterative rather than recursive, like I did for walk(). Other than that, the main portion of code for categories is done.

Again, feel free to test it out and let me know how it goes!