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The guys and gals at Automattic have published their Google Summer Of Code 2008 Codex Article which highlights various mentors and ideas. For those of you who don’t know what the Google Summer Of Code Project is all about, here is a brief intro.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together over 1,500 students with over 130 open source projects to create millions of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its fourth year. If are feeling nostalgic or are interested in learning more about the projects we have worked with in the past, check out the 2006 and 2007 program pages.

There are some big names on the mentor list such as Matt Mullenweg, Lloyd Budd, Joseph Scott and newly acquired Andy Peatling with Matt taking on the double duty of being the Mentor’s Mentor. Mentors act as administrators over a particular idea or project that is undertaken by a student.

Some of the ideas that have been proposed for this years GSOC include:

• Performance
• XML-RPC
• Web Forums Export/Import Standard and Tools
• WordPress Import/Export Tuning
• Trac Social Bug Tracking development
• Integrated Caching Solutions
• XHTML validation framework, which helps ensure that all output of WP (including templates) produces valid HTML
• Extending the search system to support more advanced search syntax, relevance, and external APIs like Google or Yahoo’s.
• Batch editing of post and attachment attributes such as categories, tags, author.

As you can see, there is good range of projects for the aspiring coder to participate in. If you are looking to hone your skills and are looking for a challenge, this is a good way for you to test your knowledge.

If you would like to see what was worked on in the previous GSoC, check out the WordPress SOC 2007 Google Group or the article within the Codex.

If you post code on your Wordpress blog, you could use a code beautifier plugin such as syntax highlighter or you could include your code in <pre> tags. They preserve line breaks, multiple blanks, tabs between words and other formatting commonly used in code. However, in some cases, if body of your blog is narrow(er) or your line of code is really long, it will not wrap and will overflow over your sidebar. You can just hide the overflow but that still will look tacky and not very usable. On performing a little search, I discovered that Tyler Longren had already come up with a clever hack to solve the problem. If you add the following code to your stylesheet, it will wrap the long lines of code.

pre {

    white-space: pre-wrap; /* css-3 */

    white-space: -moz-pre-wrap !important; /* Mozilla, since 1999 */

    white-space: -pre-wrap; /* Opera 4-6 */

    white-space: -o-pre-wrap; /* Opera 7 */

    word-wrap: break-word; /* Internet Explorer 5.5+ */

}

via Amit (via Lorelle)

[EDIT] Thanks for the catch, the date was wrong. Links remain same, but the date changed.

10 Rules for your Small Business Website: Having worked for a small business for some time and with Wordpress being such a widely used tool for building small business websites, I think most of these are well thought out and make a lot of sense. My ex-employers website violates almost every rule mentioned.

Spotback provides you with a small script to embed on your posts to provide centralized and socialized ranking for almost anything. Visitors will also receive personalized referrals and recommendations from your site or blog. No Wordpress plugin available but I am sure the plugin programmers out there can whip something up quite easily with the Wordpress hooks available.

Perils of Problogging ia points out the Perils of “Problogging” and when I was notified of the entry, I almost felt like I was being singled out. Food for thought.

JS-Kit is another centralized ratings widget with commenting built in. Not sure how the commenting would help Wordpress bloggers but the ratings widgets are quite nice. However, the commenting/ratings widget might be used for static HTML pages quite conveniently and since JS-Kit uses Akismet to mitigate Spam, comments are bound to be spam free.

Amatomu and Afrigator are Two African blog aggregators with a variety of feed and channel features built in. I was pleasantly surprised to see the volume and quality of blogging activity going on in that subcontinent.

This is a new series of weekly posts that will highlight requests that are sent to us from users looking for a certain tool or functionality. In many cases the tools are either just not there, someone has not thought of it yet, not possible to acheive or the solution has been completely overlooked by us. This would a good place for suggestions, links, directions and offers of help. I will not post the requesters contact information unless expressly asked to do so. If you have asked us for help and see your request in the list, please check back this post or subscribe to the comments. If you need help or have a request or a question that you would like added, please use the Contact Form in the top menu or email one of the authors of this blog. There will be a single WP WishList post per week and only if there are enough requests in the week.

Disclaimer: This is meant for those that have tried to find a solution, posted on the Wordpress Support Forums, searched the web and have still not found the solution they were looking for. If the answer is blatant and can be easily searched and found, you might find your requests ignored. This is not meant for help or support of existing tools, nor is it aimed towards paid development or support. This is mostly an idea generation tool for Wordpress developers who are looking to write new plugins, widgets, tools and hacks and for the community to use in case they are sorely missing a feature/plugin/widget they would love to have.

This weeks requests for ideas include:

• A Sidebar Archives plugin or widget that reduces the use of vertical space, displays somewhat detailed, intuitive and useful archive links and is not very load intensive. Fancy Archives have been tested and load proved to be an issue for this user.
• The ability to include pages in reverse chronological order along with regular posts in the feed of a blog. A plugin would be fantastic, a hacked feed generator could also be nice. Note: this is not about generating a feed for a single page but including pages in the regular Wordpress feed along with regular posts.

DiggProof your Wordpress A close look at optimizing and tweaking your MySql database for Wordpress and other tips and plugins to make your Wordpress blog faster than it already is. Even though Wordpress is fast in its own right, this article is geared for high traffic blogs and especially those that run Wordpress on smaller Virtual Private Servers.

While we are on the subject of optimizations, the newly released Wordpress 2.1 Ella has introduced many code and query optimizations that should make Wordpress much faster than it already was. For example, one of the changes introduced to handle future posts gives the database the ability to cache more queries at the MySql level and should reduce load on the database server (however minuscule).