WordPress is a PHP-based open source (GPLv2 or later) web publishing platform that has been around for almost 8 years. Led by Matt Mullenweg, the project currently has five lead developers, half a dozen additional committers, and hundreds of contributing developers. WordPress is translated into 66 languages, and is used by over 30 million people around the world to publish web content.
We are extremely pleased to be a participating organization in the 2011 Google Summer of Code. We have a team of experienced core developers lined up to mentor the student projects: Aaron Campbell, Aaron Jorbin, Alex Mills, Andrew Nacin, Andy Skelton, Austin Matzko, Chris Jean, Cristi Burca, Dan Roundhill, Daryl Koopersmith, Dominik Schilling, Eric Mann, Mitcho Erlewine, John James Jacoby, Jon Cave, Justin Shreve, Nikolay Bachiyski, Pete Mall, Peter Westwood, and Thorsten Ott.
We are most interested in working with students who are already familiar with the WordPress codebase, and will give preference to those who have submitted at least one core patch or created one plugin for the wordpress.org plugin repository. This helps us ensure that no time will be lost at the beginning of the project to learning the basic coding practices in WordPress, and that you'll know you enjoy working with our code and community. If you haven't submitted code in these ways before, you are encouraged to do so before submitting your application, even if it is only a trivial patch or plugin.
Things to get you started:
We're very much looking forward to your proposal. To increase your chances in this competitive environment, it is recommended that you run your project idea past the developer community and/or specific potential mentors before you apply to get feedback that can improve your application's chances. Applications will be be accepted March 28–April 8, so get started now if you haven't already. Good luck!
