WordPress Google Summer of Code Students!

Ten students are being paid $4500 USD each to working on WordPress this summer!

84 students applied to work with WordPress as part of this year’s Google Summer of Code. All the applications were excellent, and it was incredible hard for our eight mentors to choose. Robert Deaton and I stretched a little bit and are mentoring two students each — I know the whole WordPress village will be helping us.

Today, I finished replying to each of the applicants that were not accepted. It was very hard. There are are so many fantastic proposals that I still hope see light — if you applied be sure to blog about your proposal! Although you will not be compensated, if you have the time, I am sure that there are many people that will help you.

Here are the 10 students and their projects that were accepted:

• Ronald Heft, Jr’s Podcasting Support (blog post), mentored by Lloyd Budd
• Mike Grouchy’s Comment Panel and Commenting System Additions (blog post), mentored by Peter Westwood
• Matthias Bauer’s Internationalization Revisited, mentored by Nikolay Bachiyski
• Keith Bowes’ Easier template tags, mentored by Andy Skelton
• Dion Hulse’s WordPress Update Plugin, mentored by Robert Deaton
• Corey Shaffer’s Helping Improve the Content Management of WordPress, mentored by Brian Layman
• Celeste Lyn Paul’s WordPress Market and Suitability Research and Prototyping (blog post), mentored by Matt Mullenweg
• Luc Bizeul’s Create Unit Test Framework for Editor Formatting, mentored by Lloyd Budd
• Bernardo Santos’s Hierarchical Page (list) Management using jQuery, mentored by Michael Adams
• Andrew Nelson’s Performance Testing, mentored by Robert Deaton

Welcome!

The summer of code starts May 28.

For those community members interested in tracking — or better yet participating in — the progress of the 10 projects over the summer, we have created a group for the students and mentors and a repository for their code.

---

Thank you Google! Wednesday, Leslie Hawthorn of Google’s Open Source Team, announced over 900 students of nearly 6,200 were accepted into the Google Summer of Code for 2007. My guess this will “cost” Google this year over $4 million USD!