My Summer of Code
“For what it is worth, you were the next application after the cutoff (#21). Thanks for applying. Hope you apply again =)”… ouch. Last fall I applied for Google Summer of Code (SOC) under the Drupal (PHP) open source project. At the time I was taking bunch of courses and didn’t have a whole lot of time. I managed to write a decent proposal, but a big part of my approach was based on modules I had evaluated many months earlier — basically I didn’t complete my homework for the proposal. My fault.
The reason I applied for the Drupal project is because [my website](http://www.ocpaddler.com) uses the software heavily and some desirable features weren’t available, so I figured I would write them myself for SOC. The $4500 was a bonus and would of allowed me to save some money. Even in not getting into the program, I could of written the program I needed, but being first loser kind of killed my motivation. Plus, PHP isn’t that fun.
So for most of June I tinkered programming Python to keep myself entertained. Finally a week or so into July after a messy Drupal upgrade I decided to rebuild my website from scratch. And four weeks later I had a semi featured Drupal clone in Python. User sessions, logins, roles/group permissions, registration, basic node functionality including creating, editing, and display, text filtering, url aliasing, node caching and other things I’m forgetting.
I’ve noticed a whole lot of ugliness in Drupal in the process, some of them mentioned [here](http://20bits.com/2007/02/27/4-problems-with-drupal/). Drupal is database query hungry. I have 15 stories listed on my front page, bang, there’s 15 queries. The total queries is probably something like 30 or 40. My rewrite is down to 6. That is one example and there are others, so I’ve been making design changes as I go, but overall the system is similar. Just better.
Don’t get me wrong though, I don’t really know what I’m doing and there’s tons more to do. Plus I haven’t looked at the code in almost 2 weeks and currently have my hands full with some other things so I can’t say when things will be ready for release. But, if you are interested in this please send me an email. kzo@kzo.net