GSoC/2015/Ideas

This page is based on the ideas page of 2014.

= General Information =

phpBB is applying to participate as a mentor organisation in Google Summer of Code 2015. If you are a student please read GSoC/2015/Instructions for application instructions. On this page you can find ideas for projects which might inspire your application. Keep in mind that you may also suggest your own project if you have a great idea for improving phpBB.

If you are a mentor, please add yourself to the list of available mentors of ideas that you think you could mentor. Feel free to add further ideas, preferably based on already discussed RFCs from Area51

= Ideas =

New phpBB Installer
Summary: The current installer used to set up phpBB is quite slow and requires user interaction at a lot of steps.

Expected results: A new, more user friendly and better extendable installer should be written. First all required data should be collected from the administrator, so the steps can be done by ajax, or pages being refreshed automatically. It should also be possible to add and possibly configure certain plugins (captcha) or extension on installation.

Knowledge Prerequisite: Object-oriented PHP, JS, jQuery

Available Mentors: Joas Schilling

Social Sharing Features
Summary: Create an extensible system supporting via an object oriented plugin system any number of 3rd party services to share content to. There may be different options, sharing a link to a topic or a particular post or maybe even a forum, or sharing complete posts or extracts of posts.

Expected results: User interface changes for sharing buttons/dialogs/etc. as well as an administration control panel page with options on configuring the various services which might require API keys to work. A extensible interface that allows extensions to supply further sharing backends.

Knowledge Prerequisite: Object-oriented PHP and Javascript required, familiarity with social sharing APIs (Facebook/Twitter) useful but not mandatory.

Available Mentors: Nils Adermann

Improved E-mail Options
Summary: The current emailing options in phpBB are somewhat lacking. Mass-emails can only be sent to specific users or a single specified group (not multiple groups and users). Administrators cannot choose specific or all forums to trigger notifications for all users. Subscriptions are currently limited to specific forums; there is no way to subscribe to all forums with one click). This is a very commonly requested feature for small community forums where users do not regularly check for updates.

Expected results: Merge the gap between forums and something like Google Groups. Improve the email notifications system for users as well as the mass-emailing system for administrators. Maintain "good practices" philosophy and the ability for users to opt not to receive notifications even if the administrator sets the feature enabled by default.

Knowledge Prerequisite: PHP, familiarity with "good email practices"

Available Mentors: Nils Adermann

Improved handling of uploaded images
Summary: Currently, phpBB supports uploading several types of images. While it is possible to create image thumbnails, images that exceed the dimensions set in the administrations control panel will be rejected. Users and board admins often request that the possibility to resize images during upload is added to the core.

Expected results: Add a modular system for resizing uploaded images based on the already existing RFC. The system should fall back to less preferred ways of resizing if other types are not available. Board admins should be able to specify a maximum file size and resolution of images that will be resized and possibly be able to set a flood limit.

Knowledge Prerequisite: PHP, JS, jQuery

Available Mentors: Marc Alexander

phpBB and Symfony Integration Bundle
Brief Explanation: What we are looking for is a symfony bundle that provides intergration between phpBB and Symfony. The bundle could/should contain (You don't need to do all of this functionality yourself and are welcome to suggest additional things):
 * Sessions, Authorisation and Authentication Intergration. Logging into phpBB should authenticate you on the symfony site and symfony should be able to check/use phpBB permissions, get user data and use phpBB as a user provider through intergration with the security component.
 * An API for common functionality such as submitting posts, getting statistics, reading configuration data, get data on who is in groups and stripping bbcodes

Expected Results: We expect all proposed features/improvements/changes completed. It should be able to be broken down into smaller manageable phases/chunks (one per feature or bug fix) and your timeline should detail these phases.

Knowledge Prerequisites: PHP (Essential), Symfony (Highly Preferred), phpBB (Useful), Git (Preferred).

Available Mentors: Michael Cullum (Main Mentor), Paul Sohier (Backup Mentor)

Area51/Development Micro-Site
Brief Explanation: Area51 is a micro-site for phpBB.com for development of phpBB. It contains the Continuous Integration, Development Discussion Board, API Documentation, Development Wiki, Bug Tracker and more. We would like this revamped in either a frontend way (new design that can have a header shared by all the web applications and design for the main informational pages) or new pages/features or both. Some suggested changes are below but you are not just limited to these and can suggest others in your proposal:
 * A New Getting Involved Page
 * More Statistics using data from Bamboo (CI), JIRA (Bug Tracker), Github and the development board
 * Intergration with JIRA, Bamboo and Github
 * Moving to phpDocumenter2 for API Documentation
 * New Area51 Style
 * Creating a parser for events docblocks and a UI to present the documentation in (Could be made a plugin for phpDocumenter2 if you choose)

Expected Results: We expect all proposed features/improvements/changes completed. It should be able to be broken down into smaller manageable phases/chunks (one per feature or bug fix) and your timeline should detail these phases.

Existing Code: https://github.com/phpbb/area51

Knowledge Prerequisites: PHP (Essential), Web Design & Usability (Essential), HTML (Essential), Symfony (Preferred), Git (Preferred), Javascript (Useful).

Available Mentors: Michael Cullum, Paul Sohier (Backup Mentor)

Website UX/UI
Brief Explanation: This is a very open ended project. Essentially it is for any improvements to the UX/UI of the website. By this we mean anything that makes parts of the website easier to use, easier to navigate or more attractive. Your proposal should contain details on what you want to improve and how you want to improve it; samples (whether descriptions or mockups or user experience flow diagrams) of how it could end up being are highly preferred however we understand there will be a process of identifying the best way to improve things so this is not expected to be completely formed. Some suggestions for parts of the website we believe in particular could use improvement are:
 * Website navigation: Side menus, main menu, search - How easy is it to navigate through the website? Is it easy to find relevant information?
 * Home page (https://www.phpbb.com/) - Is it attractive? Is it easy for users to acomplish the most common tasks they come to our website for?
 * Landing pages (e.g. https://www.phpbb.com/support/) - Are they easy to use or are they too wordy?
 * Download page (https://www.phpbb.com/downloads/)- Is it obvious how to get our different downloads? Is it obvious how to get the update packages and which update package you need? Please note: The source code for this page is not yet open source but will be for the start of GSoC.
 * Documentation - Is the process for getting support/help obvious?
 * Search - How accurate is it? How could we improve it?

If you wish to have any data from our analytics software to assist you in this project then please request it from Michael Cullum.

Note: Any proposals redesigning the whole website style will be rejected.

Expected Results: We expect all proposed features/improvements/changes completed. It should be able to be broken down into smaller manageable phases/chunks (one per feature or bug fix) and your timeline should detail these phases.

Existing Code: https://github.com/phpbb/phpbb-website

Knowledge Prerequisites: Web Design & Usability (Essential), HTML/CSS (Essential), PHP (Highly Preferred), Symfony (Preferred), Git (Preferred), Javascript (Useful).

Available Mentors: Michael Cullum, Yuriy Rusko, Paul Sohier (Backup Mentor)

Status Site Improvements
Brief Explanation: At present we have a status site located at status.phpbb.com however it's admin interface is extremely unintuitive and it's lacking in some major areas. Your idea need not improve everything there is to improve and you are welcome to come up with ideas yourself (Please discuss them in the #phpbb-www IRC channel first) but some things you could consider improving are:
 * Adding an admin dashboard
 * Intergrating the login into the rest of the site
 * Improving usability of adding new updates (Markdown Parsing for example)
 * Adding pagination to sections of the administration area
 * Adding a way to automatically post/push summaries of updates to twitter
 * Adding subscriptions so people will be notified when sites go offline/online

Expected Results: We expect all proposed features/improvements/changes completed. It should be able to be broken down into smaller manageable phases/chunks (one per feature or bug fix) and your timeline should detail these phases.

Existing Code: https://github.com/phpbb/phpBBStatusSite

Knowledge Prerequisites: PHP (Essential), HTML/CSS (Essential), Symfony (Highly Preferred), Git (Preferred), Javascript (Useful).

Available Mentors: Paul Sohier, Michael Cullum, Yuriy Rusko

Documentation System
Brief Explanation: To be completed. Please email website [at] phpbb [dot] com or ask in the #phpbb-www IRC channel for details until then.

Expected Results: We expect all proposed features/improvements/changes completed. It should be able to be broken down into smaller manageable phases/chunks (one per feature or bug fix) and your timeline should detail these phases.

Knowledge Prerequisites: PHP (Essential), phpBB Extensions (Preferred/Useful), Git (Preferred), Javascript (Useful).

Available Mentors: Yuriy Rusko (Main Mentor), Michael Cullum (Backup Mentor), Paul Sohier (Backup Mentor)

Donation with Group Membership Extension
Summary: While there's a high demand, there are currently no validated extensions available for adding donation functionality to phpBB. After successful donation of a specified amount, users should automatically be added to a predefined group. As Payment Service Provider (PSP) at least PayPal should be supported.

Expected results: A validated phpBB extension which adds donation functionality to phpBB and allows admins to specify a minimum amount for automatic group membership. The extension should support PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN) to detect when to add users to the group. Support for multiple PSP's should be taken into account during the complete development. When time allows, additional features such as setting a group membership duration, automatically send PMs about donation status, setting donation goals and built in support for additional PSP's can be added.

Knowledge Prerequisite: Object-oriented PHP, SQL, phpBB Extensions system. (Preferred: Knowledge of PSP's and specifically PayPal IPN)

Available Mentors: Derk Ruitenbeek, Matt Friedman

Your Own
You do not have to use one of the ideas listed here. For non-website ideas, RFCs on Area51 are a good source of ideas as they represent what our users already told us they want. For website ideas feel free to contact one of the website mentors (via IRC [#phpb-www] or email `website [at] phpbb [dot] com`). However, if you propose an original idea it will have a higher chance of being accepted if it satisfies the following two criteria:


 * 1) Checkpointable - it should be possible to break down your project into pieces that are by themselves meaningful. In practical terms, this means you should be sending a pull request every 1-2 weeks reflecting your work during that period, and the pull request should be individually mergeable. Avoid proposing a project that cannot be split into 1-2 week chunks.
 * 2) Likely to be completed - this involves several factors, but at the end of the day the goal is for your work to be finished within the GSoC timeframe. You should start by detailing components of your project to sufficient extent that they can be estimated. Then, honestly estimate how long you think it will take you. Then double that estimate. If you exceed 3 months, your proposal is probably too ambitious and you should reduce its scope.

= Contacts =

These are all the people affiliated with phpBB who are assisting with the program as (backup) mentors or (backup) org admins. Their IRC Nicks are listed and you can find them on freenode in #phpbb-dev. They can help you with anything related to the ideas they are mentoring or general GSoC queries.

Org Admins:
 * Main: Yuriy Rusko - IRC: Marshalrusty OR YuriyRusko // Email: operations@phpbb.com // Timezone: UTC -5
 * Backup: Patrick Webster - IRC: Noxwizard // Timezone: UTC -6

Mentors:
 * Nils Adermann - IRC: naderman // Email: naderman@phpbb.com // Timezone: UTC +1 // Focus: Core Ideas [Lead]
 * Joas Schilling - IRC: nickvergessen // Timezone: UTC +1 // Focus: Core Ideas
 * Michael Cullum - IRC: MichaelC // Email: michael@phpbb.com // Timezone: UTC // Focus: Website Ideas [Lead]
 * Yuriy Rusko - IRC: Marshalrusty OR YuriyRusko // Email: operations@phpbb.com // Timezone: UTC -5 // Focus: Website Ideas
 * Paul Sohier - IRC: Paul999 // Email: paul@phpbb.com // Timezone: UTC +1 // Focus: Website Ideas/phpBB Extensions
 * Marc Alexander - IRC: Marc // Timezone: UTC +1 // Focus: Core Ideas
 * Dhruv Goel - IRC: Dhruv // Timezone: UTC +5:30 // Focus: Core Ideas
 * Derk Ruitenbeek - IRC: Derky // Timezone: UTC +1 // Focus: phpBB Extensions
 * Matt Friedman - IRC: VSE // Timezone: UTC -8 // Focus: phpBB Extensions