If you're interested in participating in GSoC as a student, you can apply during the normal process provided by Google. We are currently overwhelmed with interest, so we are not able to respond individually to each person who is interested.
We have written our some loose ideas for projects to work on here.
We are also open to any other ideas that students might have.
Collections of Projects
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This project involves building a user interface for groups of projects in Read the Docs (`Collections`).
Users would be allowed to create, publish, and search a `Collection` of projects that they care about.
We would also allow for automatic creation of `Collections` based on a project's ``setup.py`` or ``requirements.txt``.
Once a user has a `Collection`,
we would allow them to do a few sets of actions on them:
* Search across all the projects in the `Collection` with one search dialog
* Download all the project's documentation (PDF, HTMLZip, Epub) for offline viewing
* Build a landing page for the collection that lists out all the projects, and could even have a user-editable description, similar to our project listing page.
There is likely other ideas that could be done with `Collections` over time.
Support for additional build steps for linting, testing, and other useful things
Currently we're using a homegrown library for Elastic Search.
There is a new `elasticsearch-dsl <http://elasticsearch-dsl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/>`_ library that we should be using.
This project will include:
* Improving our search indexing
* Refactoring how we "model" our search data to use elasticsearch-dsl Models
* Add additional search data into our indexes, like the programming languages, type of document (tutorial, api, etc.) and other data for users to filter by
* (Optional) Improve the UX of the search for users in various ways
Finish YAML config
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Currently we have a basic :doc:`/yaml-config` for Read the Docs.
It's still considered beta,
and there are a number of features that it doesn't support.
We need to support everying users can currently do from our website dashboard inside the YAML file,
and then plan a smooth transition path from the database UI to the YAML file.
This is a *large* project and will likely require a good deal of understanding of both Python as well as web technologies.
We have a `starting list of issues <https://github.com/rtfd/readthedocs.org/milestone/28>`_ put together,
but there will be much more work.
Integrated Redirects
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Right now it's hard for users to rename files.
We support redirects,
but don't create them automatically on file rename,
and our redirect code is brittle.
We should rebuild how we handle redirects across a number of cases:
* Detecting a file change in git/hg/svn and automatically creating a redirect
* Support redirecting an entire domain to another place
* Support redirecting versions
There will also be a good number of things that spawn from this, including version aliases and other related concepts, if this task doesn't take the whole summer.
API V3
~~~~~~
We currently have a "v2" API that isn't well documented and doesn't allow users to write to it.
We want to continue using Django REST Framework for this,
but rethink how we're presenting our information to our users.
Currently we're showing everything as simple "models",
and we want to start exposing "methods" on our data,
similar to GitHub.
This is a large project and should only be done by someone who has done some basic API design previously.
Improve Translation Workflow
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Currently we have our documentation & website translated on Transifex,
but we don't have a management process for it.
This means that translations will often sit for months before making it back into the site and being available to users.
This project would include puting together a workflow for translations:
* Communicate with existing translators and see what needs they have
* Help formalize the process that we have around Transifex to make it easier to contribute to
* Improve our tooling so that integrating new translations is easier