Being one of the CiviCRM developers for the past three years, the community/boding period in my case went pretty nicely. :) As part of my regular CiviCRM activities, through most of the past month I’ve been working on the new dedupe engine, and I’m really happy with the results – but it’s high time now to concentrate on my Summer of Code activities.
As my set of CiviCRM hats includes being the project’s Subversion repository administrator, it was my pleasure to setup the repositories for both Jon’s and mine GSoC projects – the branches are gsoc-ui and gsoc-i18n, respectively (for those interested, browsing the activities in our repository is most efficient with our FishEye install).
Given CiviCRM’s fast release cycle (three-four releases a year), the code from the GSoC projects won’t be a part of the upcoming CiviCRM 2.1 release, and will either be included in CiviCRM 2.2 or CiviCRM 2.3. To that end, both projects were branched from the main developer ‘trunk’, and as our main development on trunk continues, the changes happening on trunk will be merged to both GSoC branches on a ~weekly basis.
The decision when to include both (or either) projects’ code into CiviCRM ‘proper’ will be made after we branch for CiviCRM 2.1, and will depend on the shape and the scope of the changes introduced in both projects; once we believe they’re ‘good enough’, we’ll start merging the changes happening on the gsoc-* branches to trunk.
For me personally, this week started with taking part in a very interesting conference, and was sweetened even more by winning an award for the best paper in my field there. :) Now that the conference is over and the technical infrastructure is all set up, I can finally concentrate on bringing first-class multi-language support to CiviCRM – a topic which is very close to my heart, and which makes me go back to the time when I was taking my baby steps in CiviCRM development: when I joined the team in May 2005, I joined it as a localisation/internationalisation expert. At that time, the goal was to make CiviCRM usable for people outside the English-speaking part of humanity; now it’s high time to make it usable for multi-lanugage communities and organisations.
