[Gsoc-students] Google. Summer of Code proposal question

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi Michael,

> My name is Michael Ngo and I am currently studying Computer Science at
> University of California, Berkeley. Currently I am interested in
> contributing to Plone by working on the email handling system. My question
> is whether this proposal will affect Plone's core system or will it be
> added to Plone as an add on? My abstract for the proposal is attached at
> the end of the email.  Lastly any comments on my abstract will be greatly
> appreciated.

Most likely, you'd develop a generic component that could be configured 
to plug into Plone. The decision on what goes into the core is up to the 
framework team, who evaluate proposals, and the release manager, who 
accepts them. I imagine that something like this would be able to start 
as an optional dependency for third party products needing this 
functionality, and then eventually would be considered for shipping with 
plone core.

> 
> This proposal will improve the current email handling system in Plone by
> incorporating an email-blog gateway feature to:
> 1. allow incoming email messages (in Plone) to be converted to new blog
> entries, and
> 2. allow new blog entries (and comments on blog entries) to generate
> outgoing email messages to anyone subscribed to a blog’s watchlist.
> 
> The mail-blog gateway would offer richer functionality than an email-only
> subscription list, as the user is free to choose to receive notifications
> of new entries as: an RSS or Atom feed, or as an email notification.  As
> the user is able to add new entries to the blog simply by sending an email
> to the mail-blog gateway in Plone, all mailing list entries are
> transparently logged in Plone for archival purposes.
> 
> The mail-blog gateway feature may initially be implemented as an add-on
> product to avoid bloating Plone's core code base. Plone's core framework
> team would decide at a later time if the add-on product is valuable enough
> to be included as a core feature in a future release of Plone, a discussion
> beyond the scope of this proposal.
> 
> The mail-blog gateway aims to offer an improved method of getting content
> into the system and exporting content out of the system. The gateway will
> address Plone improvement proposal (PLIP) 182:
> 
> http://plone.org/products/plone/roadmap/182
> 
> and may address parts of PLIP 183 as well.
> 
> http://plone.org/products/plone/roadmap/183

This looks good, though you should also describe something about how you 
intend to make sure you complete your work, and how much time you think 
you'll have to work on it.

Also, limiting the functionality to blogs only (and bearing in mind 
Plone doesn't ship with blog functionality out of the box) seems a 
little limiting to me. It may be possible to generalise further, so that 
mail-in blogging is only one form of inbound mail handling.

Martin