jCamp - JSOP 2010 is gearing up

What is the JSOP?

This is probably the fist question which comes to everybody's mind. Well, JSOP is an acronym for "Joomla! student outreach program". This program offers students a unique opportunity to participate in developing projects of value to the Joomla! community. Basically, students are assigned to mentors all around the world and work on a project for three months (during summer) under mentor's guidance. More information about this program can be found here.

Why am I mentioning it?

Because I'm a member of one team of those students. Our team is currently working on a project management tool extension for Joomla! 1.6. In short, the goal of our extensions is to provide user-friendly tool for everybody to manage his projects across all parts of their production cycles. In order to accomplish this goal we follow several philosophies. The most important one is called KISS (not that famous band :) - "Keep it simple, Stupid!"). Thus everything is kept as simple as possible and no unnecessary features are included. The second important philosophy is DRY - Don't repeat yourself!. DRY philosophy makes our code both clear and easy to modify in furute. Both of these philosophies together enable us to speed up our work on the project and fully benefit from resources Joomla! 1.6 provides.

What is current status of this project?

We started about three weeks ago and we're working very hard on portfolio gallery right now. Currently we're able to create a portfolio of our projects (even more portfolios), assign projects to it (and also create them, edit them, (un)publish them and delete them), go through them and look at their overviews. In addition, we can assign Joomla!'s users to a specific project. However, we cannot set his role in the project yet. Tasks for the next milestone (btw, the next milestone is date on next Monday) are pretty straight forward - to work on "task manager" part and "enable assigning documents to a project". In this stage, we also want to make our views to look awesome so part of our team has started to work on CSS and HTML code of our views.

How many people work on this extension?

At this time, our team consists of four people but we expect 2 people to join us very soon.

Well folks, so this is it for now. I hope you enjoyed my brief introduction to our team and project and will stay tuned for next updates and further details about our goals, progress and everything.

See ya soon!