Hi Everyone!
I’m Mert Yazicioglu from Ankara, Turkey and I will be working on enhancing profiles.wordpress.org this summer. I’m currently studying Computer Technology and Information Systems at Bilkent University for a BS degree and I have just completed my junior year.
I have been actively using WordPress for the past 2.5 years and have been trying to contribute WordPress one way or another since. Apart from the countless WordPress projects I worked on and being listed as a Core Contributor since version 3.3, my most notable involvement with WordPress was participating and successfully completing Google Summer of Code 2011 by developing a migration tool for WordPress, called WordPress Move. It has been downloaded more than 58,000 times so far and it is being downloaded more than 100 times every single day.
This summer, I will be working on enhancing profiles.wordpress.org which I think has a really great potential to bond the WordPress community even better. As we have a limited time, we can only realise some of the ideas I have proposed in my proposal and to decide which to drop, we held a meeting together with my mentors Boone B. Gorges and Scott Reilly, last Tuesday.
In that meeting, we have decided to drop the following three ideas I have proposed[0] from the scope, as the other tasks need much more attention: Latest Posts, Showcase and Following Each Other. Although we have decided to drop these from the scope, we will most likely implement these after the Google Summer of Code. These are good examples of how we can develop the new profiles further, so naturally these should be worked on after the new profiles are ready to be used.
We have also decided that the following three tasks are relatively easy to tackle and should be a part of the things we will be working on this summer: Better Representation of the Information, Links to Profiles on Other Sites, A Better Way to List Plugins and Enhanced Activity Stream. Though, the last one will really be tricky 🙂
Finally, if we have enough time left, we will be working on creating a Profiles Homepage, on which I’m planning to present some data such as: The Newest Core Contributors, The Newest Plugin Authors, The Newest Theme Creators, The Recent Rockstars etc. and a feed on which we show the recent activities of the users. Our main goal there will be to motivate users.
In my proposal there was also Gamification but having so much on our plates, we had to either pick Profiles Homepage or Gamification as a task to work on if we have some extra time left. As I mentioned before, we will be working on the tasks we are dropping today, after Google Summer of Code completes and Gamification is certainly one of them. We will most probably add simple motivators here and there to provide some simple Gamification anyway.
I think we have a great summer ahead and I’m sure we will be able produce something really valuable for the WordPress community!
See you next week!
[0] http://www.mertyazicioglu.com/2013/05/02/gsoc-2013-proposal-enhance-profiles-wordpress-org/