Summer of Code 2009 students

For the fourth consecutive year, the Plone Foundation is participating in Google's Summer of Code programme, this year mentoring 7 students to help them improve Plone.

This year's students will be working on Atom Publication Protocol support, e-commerce, ontologies, PloneFormGen, better support for large folders and the commenting infrastructure, on a range of projects that will benefit both users of Plone 3 and users of the next major revision, Plone 4.

These 7 projects represent an investment of $35,000 in the development of Plone by Google, a significant part of the over $95,000 provided to Plone since the inception of the Summer of Code initiative.  While the majority of this money goes as a stipend to the participating students, Google has also donated over $10,000 directly to the Plone Foundation.

This year's students and mentors are:

Student Topic Mentor
Chelsea Bingiel Atom Publishing Protocol Matthew Wilkes
Michael Mulich Atom Publishing Protocol Kevin Kalupson
Derek Richardson GetPaid checkout/payment architecture Brandon Craig Rhodes
Matthew Lange Pluggable ontologies Raphael Ritz
Quyết Nguyễn Đức PloneFormGen improvements Steve McMahon
Sean Upton Large Folder UI/scalability Carsten Senger
Timo Stollenwerk Commenting improvements Martin Aspeli

They will be submitting regular updates to various Plone mailing lists, the most important of which will be posted here. If you would like more information on these projects, or to talk to one of the students about their project, you can find them in #plone-soc on irc.freenode.net (Mentors are operators, students have voice).

Congratulations to all! The Plone community is fortunate to have such a talented group of students and mentors for Summer of Code 2009, and we tremendously appreciate all of your efforts to make Plone even more excellent. And, as always, thanks to the folks at Google for making Summer of Code possible!