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GSOC 2013 Project Ideas

Trung Lê edited this page Jun 15, 2013 · 15 revisions

Google Summer of Code 2013

Information for Students

These ideas were contributed by our developers and users. They are sometimes vague or incomplete. If you wish to submit a proposal based on these ideas, you may wish to contact the developers and find out more about the particular suggestion you're looking at.

Being accepted as a Google Summer of Code student is quite competitive. Accepted students typically have thoroughly researched the technologies of their proposed project and have been in frequent contact with potential mentors. Simply copying and pasting an idea here will not work. On the other hand, creating a completely new idea without first consulting potential mentors is unlikely to work out.

When writing your proposal or asking for help from the general Spree community don't assume people are familiar with the ideas here. Feel free to explain that you are considering a project idea for GSOC and that you're here to help. The spree-user mailing list on Google Groups is the best way to reach members of the community. You can also try reaching our community manager (@ryanbigg on Twitter, radar on IRC) and bouncing your ideas off him.

Possible Ideas for a Project

Integration with Twitter Card

Summary:

Twitter Product Card (https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/types/product-card) is a very good way to share products and drive sales. A simple and elegant integration with Spree would make life much easier for everyone.

Ideal For:

Someone who is familiar with Rails, RESTful API and Spree

Technologies Involved:

JS, Ruby, CSS, Rails

Theme Market

Summary:

Other existing ecommerce has a large number of theme market that sell commercial and free theme. The goal is to create a market place portal that allow theme designers to share or sell their themes easily.

Ideal For:

Someone who has CMS and payment gateway.

Technologies Involved:

JS, Ruby, CSS

Automatically listing products to Google Shopping directory

Summary:

Spree has no integration with Google Shopping for syncing products, with Google Product Listing Ads for creating product ads and list products on Google Shopping. The goal is to provide an intuitive interface to set up Google Shopping hook.

Ideal For:

Someone who has familiarity with Web App integration

Technologies Involved:

JS, Ruby, HTTP API

Create Spree libraries in languages other than Ruby

Summary:

Spree has an excellent REST API but the functionality would be more widely used if we wrapped this API into language-specific libraries that people would feel comfortable using. The goal would be to write several of these libraries during the project period.

Ideal For:

Someone who has familiarity with multiple languages

Technologies Involved:

Java, C#, Objective C, Python, PHP, etc.

Create a Skeleton Spree Mobile App

Summary:

Spree has an excellent REST API that several people have already used to create mobile applications. The goal would be to write a basic mobile application during the project period that store owners / developers could download and customize for their own publication.

Ideal For:

Someone who has familiarity with a mobile language (Objective C, Java, etc)

Technologies Involved:

Objective C, Java, Visual C++, REST

Create a Business Intelligence Reporting Interface

Summary:

Spree has a lot of product ordering data available, but doesn't do any significant reporting on it. For store owners that are interested in it, it would be nice to have the ability to generate dynamic reports based on a variety of criteria, save them, or even subscribe to them and have them sent on a scheduled basis.

Ideal For:

Someone with an analytical mind, experience with Business Intelligence, Ruby on Rails, SQL, etc.

Technologies Involved:

Ruby on Rails, HTML, Javascript

Native Advanced Product Search

Summary:

Spree has a simple keyword search built in, and several extensions available that use 3rd party software (Solr, Sphinx) but no native solution for doing advanced searching. Store owners should be able to customize how they allow customers to search... within categories, filtering by price, product properties, etc.

Ideal For:

Someone with an analytical mind and experience with Ruby on Rails.

Technologies Involved:

Ruby on Rails

Machine Learning Product Recommendation Engine

Summary:

The biggest players in E-commerce use machine learning to target customers and products based on individual behavior and behavior of others with similar interests and buying habits. The goal would be to record enough data about user interaction (what products they viewed, what they added to their cart, what was purchased together) to be able to provide recommendations, alter search order, allow for targeted marketing, etc.

Ideal For:

Someone with a grasp of algorithms and machine learning.

Technologies Involved:

Ruby on Rails

Daily Deal Extension

Summary:

A commonly requested feature is the ability to do "Daily Deals", where there's often only one product being sold at a time. Ideally somebody could wrap up all the relevant functionality into an extension to fulfill this need.

Ideal For:

Someone with experience programming in Ruby on Rails.

Technologies Involved:

Ruby on Rails