gsoc12 : pidgin plugin website

[Nikhil Bafna]

Hi.

I am Nikhil Bafna, a 4th year undergrad at BITS Pilani, India.

I am one of the 4 selected gsoc tudents to work with Pidgin this summer. My project proposal is "Building a Pidgin Plugin Website, from where user can easily discover & download plugins for their platform and rate & review them as well, intuitively. Developers would use it upload, modify and delete information about their plugins, maintain change log and get feedback from the user community."

The complete proposal for the project can be viewed here.

The period of coding for GSoC officially started yesterday, 21st May and will continue up to 20th of August. Throughout this period, I will post weekly updates on my work :-)


To provide a brief sum down of the project, I will be coding it in python + django + postgre. I have divided the project into 5 major chunks -

User frontend
User backend
Developer frontend
Developed backend
Integration with Pidgin Client
The version control system is Monotone and for the time being I will be hosting the code on Heroku until we decide the production environment of the website.

The area of focus for first two weeks (May 21 - June 5) is on the "User frontend". This was the part I had worked a bit on during the application period and demo for that is at pidgin.heroku.com.

The detailed plan for the next two weeks is as below.

During the first week, I will code up templates for the various user frontend pages. The hierarchy of which will look like -

/
/popular

/login
/signup

/plugin/plugin_id
/category/category_name

/dashboard

/about
/faq


As I mentioned in the proposal, the aim is to have a responsive design that scales down to small screens, doesn't break when js is disabled. Also, from the discussion during the application period, the theme was the site will be similar to pidgin.im. Since, I have suggested 2 weeks for this part - the first week is for coming up with the initial drafts. The entire 2nd week is for iteration based on feedback, testing and ensuring compatibility with older browsers (IE 6 *cringe*)

Also, I haven't been as interactive with community during the bonding period as much as I have would have preferred but I am looking forward to reverse that, as I was reminded in congratulatory mail that "over-communication is preferable to under-communication"


That's about it for now. The progress can be viewed at pidgin.heroku.com (which for now has work from my application period) and my contact details are -

mail - nrbafna at soc.pidgin.im
blog - http://nrbafna.blogspot.com/
nrbafna on #pidgin

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