Project Ideas
 | We're looking for projects that add value to the FarCry framework itself or optionally extend the usefulness of FarCry overall. Plugins, user directories, formtools, and other extensions are very welcome. |
Blogger API
Build a plugin that allows developers to add a standard blogging API. This should be configurable to allow external clients to update any content type. How cool would it be to be able to "blog" any content, rather than just blog posts?
Experience: ColdFusion, understanding of blogger API a plus
Difficulty: Moderate
FarCy Lucene
Build a plugin that utilises the Lucene search engine and provides free text search options for any content or associated media asset. Could use the FarCry Verity plugin as a blueprint for this work although configuration options for Lucene will be significantly different. Plus Mat has some prototype ColdFusion components for hooking into and configuring Lucene that would form a good starting point for integration.
Experience: ColdFusion, understanding of Lucene a plus
Difficulty: Moderate
Reporting Plugin
The built-in web stats reporting engine was removed from FarCry Core 5.0 framework. The code needs to be re-purposed into an optional plugin for developers who want to continue to use these features. This is actually a nice little contained project we plenty of scope for experimentation.
Experience: ColdFusion
Difficulty: Moderate
Google Analytics Plugin
Google Analytics is a very popular addition to many FarCry sites. While adding functionality to populate pages with a basic urchin is udimentary, we're after a cunning way of integrating advanced Analytic features. Build a plugin that makes it easy to track external links, file downloads, and especially important, point-n-click goal tracking set up.
Experience: ColdFusion, knowledge of Google Analytics a bonus
Difficulty: Moderate
Plugin Explorer
Build an online webservice to manage the community plugin library. Build an interface within the webtop to deploy and remove plugins as desired. Extend the plugin architecture to incorporate plugin dependencies, plugin deactivation and plugin installation.
Experience: ColdFusion
Difficulty: Moderate-High
OpenID User Directory
Creating an OpenID user directory that allows users to register and log in with OpenID's. The project would involve hooking in with the standard FarCry user profile, and providing synchronisation with the remote OpenID profile as required.
Experience: ColdFusion
Difficulty: Moderate
OpenID Server
Extending the default internal user directory so that it provides OpenIDs for users to use outside FarCry – in effect turning FarCry into an OpenID server. Would be super cool to actually allow FarCry to provide an openID server interface to other FarCry user directory options. For example, you might have extended FarCry to use ActiveDirectory as an authentication method – why not then allow the user to use those active directory credentials through OpenID.
Experience: ColdFusion
Difficulty: High
Forum application
A FarCry port of industry standard forum functionality. Plenty of FarCry forum integrations have been done – it's about time we had a native forum solution. Afterall FarCry makes for a fantastic framework for forum construction.
Experience: ColdFusion
Difficulty: Moderate
Derby DB support
FarCry can currently run on MS SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle. The recent ColdFusion release now has Derby built in. This project would involve adding Derby support to FarCry core. Other possible features:
- Create database on install
- Refactoring of fourq / db gateways
Experience: ColdFusion
Difficulty: High
i18n webtop
i18n in the webtop and FarCry Core framework has come a long way, but development has been interrupted and postponed till the 5.1 release or later. The devised framework needs to be fleshed out, tested, and then fully implemented throughout the codebase.
Experience: ColdFusion, some experience with locales and i18n issues a plus
Difficulty: Moderate
Ecommerce Gateway Plugins
The development of a standard set of plugins for plug'n'play integration with ecommerce gateways. Suggested gateways include Amazon, Google Checkout and Paypal.
Experience: ColdFusion, some experience with the relevant API
Difficulty: Moderate
Ecommerce Shopping Cart Plugin
FarCry is used to build a lot of ecommerce solutions, however, there is no community plugin for the provision of standard product cataloguing and shopping cart options.
Experience: ColdFusion, some experience with the relevant API
Difficulty: Moderate
Unit Testing Framework
Although its relatively straightforward to leverage existing unit testing frameworks from the ColdFusion community, we need a special testing harness built to better enable unit tests to perform within the context and/or active state of an operational application.
Experience: ColdFusion, experience with unit testing
Difficulty: Difficult
Nested Tree Model Refactoring
FarCry implements the Joe Celko nested tree model for managing nested content; for example, the site overview tree, and category tree structures. Although functional, we're limited by years of cruft having accumulated in this area. We need to re-write the nested tree model implementation whilst maintaining backward compatibility for existing applications.
Experience: ColdFusion, SQL
Difficulty: Difficult
Air Documentation App
An Air app to provide offline, desktop access to documentation. This app would need to be able to handle multiple sets of documentation. Preferably with the ability to add/update documentation after installation dynamically.
This app isn't necessarily FarCry specific.
Experience: AIR, WIKI, Parsing... mixed bag really
Difficulty: Moderate
Project Tracker
A FarCry implementation of a versatile project tracker. e.g. Base Camp or Unfuddle
Experience: ColdFusion
Difficulty: Moderate
Notes from Google...
An "Ideas" list should be a list of suggested student projects. This list is meant to introduce contributors to your project's needs and to provide inspiration to would-be student applicants. It is useful to classify each idea as specifically as possible, e.g. "must know Python" or "easier project; good for a student with more limited experience with C++." If your organization plans to provide an application template, it would be good to include it on your Ideas list.
Keep in mind that your Ideas list should be a starting point for student applications; we've heard from past mentoring organization participants that some of their best student projects are those that greatly expanded on a proposed idea or were blue-sky proposals not mentioned on the Ideas list at all.
Do the projects on your ideas list look feasible for student developers? Is your ideas list thorough and well-organized? Your ideas list is the first place that student participants are going to look to get information on participating in GSoC, so putting a lot of effort into this list is a good thing(tm). One thing we noticed and really appreciated this year was how some organizations classified their ideas by easy, medium and difficult, and specifically listed the skills and background required to complete a given task. It might also be cool to expand on each idea with some places to get started research-wise (pointers to documentation or specific bugs), as well as the impact finishing a given idea will have for the organization.
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