User:Stophr/GSoC 2011 Application

Extending SocialProfile

Short description SocialProfile is a MediaWiki extension that will incorperate a social profile, a user board and basic profile information into MediaWiki. The SQL used in the extension are currently pretty MySQL-centered and support for PostgreSQL are only available through patches. It also misses some features that Facebook and Twitter incorporate, and it requires some code reviewing and refactoring.

The Problem SocialProfile is a MediaWiki extension that will incorperate a social profile, a user board and basic profile information into MediaWiki. A lot of the SQL used in SocialProfile is bound to MySQL (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27732). The extension also misses some social features that many modern social networks have allready made their own, status updates is one of those features. The UserImages feature needs cleaning up and refactoring, as well as other parts of the code that need to be reviewed for potential security risks.

My Solution

My proposal is to completly review all the SQL related to the SocialProfile extension, and rewrite them where necessary. Next to that, I will encorperate extra features like status updates and the abbility to 'like' content. Also some refactoring of the UserImages feature and some general code clean-up is part of my proposal.

Planning Please take into account that I’ve got examinations starting May 30 that go until June 22. I will both study and develop during that time, but my contributions will be less.

 Before May 23

Get familiar with the MediaWiki API and the SocialProfile codebase.  May 23 to June 10

Implementing status updates.  June 10 to June 22

Implementing content recommendation.  June 22 to July 11

Refactoring of the UserImages feature.  July 11

Midterm Submission  July 11 to July 25

Refactoring more of the code as I go through it, rewriting and reviewing SQL.  July 25 to August 15

Testing PostgreSQL compatability and rewriting database schemes.  August 15 to August 22

Documentation and Final Report submission. </li> </ul>

About the author My name’s Christophe Van Gysel, I’m a Computer Science student at the University of Antwerp (http://ua.ac.be). I’m interested in web technologies and applications, cloud programming and distributed systems. I’m currently in the process of developing a social network site for a database-oriented class of mine. As an extra I’m adding tons of data mining algorithms to the network, including some work with activity feeds. I’ve done some extensive work in C++, PHP and Javascript. I’ve got a solid background in web design as a hired freelancer and launched my own Mediawiki-powered content last year when I put a collection of exams online for everyone to review and contribute to. You can find me on IRC in #mediawiki or through my account User:stophr.