Wow. 20 projects accepted for Drupal for the 2007 version of Google Summer of Code. Thanks to all the mentors and especially top GSoC wranglers Robert Douglass and Angie Byron for herding us through this application process.

Not only did this pay off in 20 projects, but the folks that help host drupal.org at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab *also* got two projects accepted which are actually working with Drupal: integrating the Google API into Drupal.

There are some really great projects planned out. Here are some of my favourites:

• RSS / Atom integration: I spent an hour or two with some of the guys from Achieve Internet last week on scoping some patches for the core aggregator code...there is lots of work to be done here, and I think we can get far, fast, by doing a bit of coordination
• Jabber / XMPP: yay! my two favourite communities continue to collide
• Scalability, Load Balancing, and High Availability: Vancouver local hadsie got in, which is great; Scott, want to work out of the Bryght offices for the summer?
• SMS Framework: it's clear that mobile users are continuing to become first class citizens of the web, but that SMS is a great tool for easily integrating into virtually any mobile environment; can I hear the phrase "Twitter clone"?

While we don't have official news from Google yet (it will be on the page about at Google), it appears that the Drupal project will get 14 students funded to work on a variety of projects this summer. The post on Drupal.org lists all the projects, students, and mentors, Dries has a screenshot from the Google SoC app, and Robert Douglass encourages everyone to digg the story.

Last year's Google Summer of Code event saw the ever-cheerful Angela Byron aka webchick become a key member of the Drupal community. We can only hope that this year's event nets one such great person to join our community.

Oh yes. Did I mention there are some seriously cool projects? Integrating the GData API, an AJAX Form creator...let the games begin!

This year I have made time to be a mentor in the Google Summer of Code program.

Every year google pays students to spend their summers developing open source software. Last year Drupal had 11 student projects, and we got some really amazing developers out of it too. (I'm looking at you webchick *g*)

I currently have one SoC proposal up, and it's a project very near and dear to me. I am talking of course about a proper integration layer with the ImageMagick binary.

A better description of what would be possible with this after the jump :

What follows is a very simple demonstration of the power of said imagemagick module, if kept simple enough.

Take this theme that I am using. It's called Leaf. Of all the ported themes, I think I like this one the most, but what do I have to do if I want to customize it.

Leaf contains the following images :

1. Background gradient
2. Header image 2 3 4
3. Footer image

Although I am simplifying this for purposes of the example. Each of these final images, could be rebuilt using the imagemagick module, and the entire site design could change at the user's choice.