Introduction
Discourse is a 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. Our software works as a mailing list, a discussion forum, and a long-form chat room. Read more about our project at: meta.discourse.org
Important Reading for Prospective Student Applicants:
- Keep reading this page to learn about our project ideas for this year.
- Learn how to start coding for Discourse by reading our comprehensive contributors guide.
- Read the Discourse Application Guide for GSoC today, and be ready when it's time to apply.
- Read Discourse as your first Rails app.
- Try to complete the Beginner's Guide to Creating Discourse Plugins.
- Ask questions about developing for Discourse on meta.discourse.org, our project discussion site. Spend time browsing the content there, especially the "dev" category.
Summer of Code Project Ideas
PLUGIN: Manually curated topic summaries
Some topics, like a call-for-bug-reports or a new Howto, will receive a lot of replies that go stale shortly thereafter because the appropriate fixes/edits were applied as a response. When closing or marking as solved doesn't make sense, the best solution to date is to delete these replies. Topic summaries offer a less destructive solution.
Specs
- Click moderator wrench
- Click select posts and select the ones you want to show in the summary
- Click "Create Summary"
This forces a summarised view of this topic by default. You get pretty much the exact same effect as you get from deleting posts, except the "public record" of helpful replies is maintained.
To view all replies, you simply click the "Show all posts" button.
- Feature is only accessible to Trust Level N and above.
- Enabled per-category
Discuss here: https://meta.discourse.org/t/plugin-manually-curated-topic-summaries/39477 (spec)
For a private conversation with mentors, send an email to team@discourse.org.
Further Reading
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/plugin-idea-thread-updates/7973 (related feature discussion)
"Make your own" with #pr-welcome
We have 100+ topics marked with the #pr-welcome tag. Most of these tasks are not big enough on their own to merit a 3 month project, but with a combination of these tasks you'll have a stacked TODO-list in no time.
For a private conversation with mentors, send an email to team@discourse.org.
- Find tasks that match your interests and skill set. Try look for tasks that are related somehow, e.g. tasks that have to do with groups.
- Ask follow-up questions in the topics of the various tasks to get a clear understanding of the problem at hand.
- Collect a bundle of tasks that you'll have a high chance of completing within 3 months.
- Add a few more tasks as stretch goals.
- Not all pr-welcome tasks are properly specced out. Make sure you use your preparation period to ask questions about your selected tasks until each task is properly specified.
Some examples below.
User Data Bundle
Tasks that involve authentication and user data.
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/reddit-oauth-api-support/21939 (good warmup task)
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-add-stackoverflow-login/54201 (good warmup task)
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/api-can-i-authenticate-without-putting-the-key-in-the-url/29425
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/override-profile-background-via-sso/41921
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/tracking-signups-from-referral/56911
For a private conversation with mentors, send an email to team@discourse.org.
Voting Bundle
Tasks that involve improvements to the Discourse Voting Plugin
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-list-sort-by-votes-in-voting-plugin/63281
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-an-option-for-anonymous-voting/58477
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/support-merging-of-2-topics-with-voting/58482
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/add-ability-to-lock-voting-without-closing-topic/58485
For a private conversation with mentors, send an email to team@discourse.org.
UX Bundle
Tasks that involve a lot of user experience work, and will benefit from some prior UX experience as some tasks require further specification.
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-bar-disappears-on-ipad-in-long-topics/55583 (good warmup task)
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/warn-staff-when-action-will-override-site-restriction/57521
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/tab-completion-should-automatically-add-a-space-after-a-username/45155
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/notifications-unread-only-filter/37621
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/order-is-not-respected-on-back-button-when-admin-user-list-is-re-ordered/70701
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/staff-cannot-delete-post-that-a-user-initiated-a-self-delete-on/75111
For a private conversation with mentors, send an email to team@discourse.org.
Email Bundle
Anything that touches on email.
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/should-always-receive-email-notification-of-pms/51291
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/possibility-to-configure-sitesetting-notification-email-from-env-variable/50087
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/hide-reply-button-in-emails-if-you-dont-have-permission/44211
- https://meta.discourse.org/t/duplicate-mails-when-to-ing-two-email-addresses/45090
For a private conversation with mentors, send an email to team@discourse.org.