Google announced today that it will be sponsoring 20 - yes twenty - projects for its Google Summer of Code program this year. From what I've seen, Drupal is one of the top "winners" if you use project quantity as a metric, with only Apache and KDE beating us (I couldn't see any others with any more at a glance). We got more than Joomla, PHP & The Mozilla Foundation and I believe this is a real achievement.
I'm also thrilled that Konstantin Käfer and I am mentoring one of the projects this year - the Taxonomy Manager.
I cant think of a better way to put this than the words used by one of the organisers of the project for Drupal's entries - Rob Douglas…
We are thrilled to announce that Google will be sponsoring 20 Drupal projects for Summer of Code 2007. The students, their projects, and the mentors for each are listed below. As the summer progresses, these students will be turning to the community for support and for help testing their work. To keep up-to-date with all of the latest SoC developments, please join the SoC 2007 working group and help out in whatever ways you can.
The projects this year show a strong focus on the core Drupal software and the infrastructure that makes Drupal.org run. For example, the translation, metrics, and RCS abstraction projects all intend to make project management on Drupal.org better in some way. The two core theme projects will help make Drupal a prettier and flashier looking software, and the search project will help make finding things with Drupal a bit easier.
Two projects focused on staging and scalability will help make Drupal more robust, two projects focusing on Drupal file handling will help shore up known weaknesses in that area. Two projects aiming to improve the taxonomy system will bring welcome extension to one of Drupal's best features, taxonomy, and the RSS/Atom project will help keep Drupal ahead of the curve in feed parsing.
Beyond that, it is easy to like projects that promise Ebay Integration, an SMS framework, Jabber integration, SVG support, a BitTorrent tracker, link auto-completion and extensions to the Case Tracker module. There is something for everyone.
Thank you to Google for the unbelievably generous support. This represents $100,000 worth of financial contributions to Drupal development, $10,000 of which will be donated to the Drupal Association. Google has helped Drupal become what it is today, and with this new support, the Drupal that emerges from the Summer of 2007 will be far better than it could have been otherwise.