Note: This post assumes that you are aware of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. If not, see that link.

UPDATE: Huge congratulations to our GHOP equally-as-awesome winners! Read about it on the Google Open Source Blog!

Also see the official GHOP grand prize winners announcement.

The GHOP contest officially ended on February 4, 2008. This contest was an absolutely amazing success, and resulted in a number of new contributors to the Drupal project. If you're interested in learning more about the contest, there was a recent Lullabot podcast about GHOP, and there will also be a session on GHOP at Drupalcon if you're interested in learning more about the program and what has been achieved in the past two months, and would like to talk to a few of the students face-to-face.

• Peter Cawley (Corsix) was selected as Drupal's GHOP grand prize winner, and will receive a paid travel to Google campus in Mountain View, California in early May, along with the GHOP winners from other projects. Peter completed a whopping 15 tasks, his greatest accomplishment being the creation of the awesome new Flexifilter module, which allows site builders to create custom input filters without having to write code and/or install a new module for each new filter. This module was envisioned by fellow GHOP student cwgordon7, and mentored by a Drupal contributor too young to take part in GHOP, dmitrig01. Way to go, Corsix!!! :D
• Peter will be accompanied on his trip to Google by Adam Light (aclight), who did a tremendous job handling the administration of the GHOP contest, as well as helping students and mentors alike with GHOP tasks.
• We'd also like to extend our congratulations to everyone who participated, including our equally-as-awesome winners, Charlie Gordon (cwgordon7), Edward Z. Yang (ezyang), Jimmy Berry (boombatower), Wilson Lee (kourge), and Dmitri G. (dmitrig01) (who was too young to participate in GHOP, but helped a lot with mentoring and administration, and so was named honorary winner :)).
• A total of 130 tasks were completed, ranging from new and upgraded modules, enhancements to existing modules, much-needed documentation, helpful videocasts, beautiful marketing materials, and more. Almost half of those were completed during the last month of the program.
• We had a total of 54 awesome student participants during the course of GHOP, of which 65% are brand new contributors who came to the Drupal project because of this contest. Amazing!
• The leaders in terms of raw task numbers were Corsix (15), boombatower (12), ezyang (10), cwgordon7 (9), and kourge (9), but we also benefited from several students who took on only a few tasks and knocked them out of the park. Most of our GHOP students are planning on remaining long-term contributors to the Drupal community. :)
• Thanks to everyone for all of the great community support we've received during this contest! Your help made it possible for these students to experience the power of an awesome open source community, and gave the community a big boost in the number of contributors.

What comes next, now that GHOP is over? DROP! Read on to find out more, and also to see a list of the tasks completed since our last status report.

What comes next? DROP!

GHOP is now over, and was a huge success, thanks to the Drupal community's support. We hope we're given the opportunity to do this again sometime real soon. :) But in the meantime, the GHOP students have created a new, Drupal-specific project that will help continue the success of GHOP: The DROP (Drupal Really Open Participation) program.

DROP will strive to capture the small, bite-sized task aspect of GHOP, but there will be no age restrictions of any sort, meaning everyone, not just 13-18 year olds, can participate. Participants earn points for proposing, mentoring, and completing "tasks," which are simply regular issues in the drupal.org issue tracker that have been "tagged" as DROP tasks.

Want to see your name up here next month? Or the month after? Then become a DROP participant, take a look at the list of open tasks to claim one. Or more than one! You can even work on tasks in small teams. And, if you come across any bite-sized tasks that would be great for members of the community who are still getting familiar with Drupal, or even some trickier things for more seasoned contributors looking for a challenge, please propose and mentor some tasks as well! Finally, we need folks to help review DROP participants' work, so check out a list of all issues on drupal.org with the phrase "DROP Task."

 There is much more information available about the DROP program at the official DROP website.

The final batch of GHOP tasks

List of the tasks that have been completed since the mid-term status report, on January 2, 2008:

Coding

• Corsix braved one of the most challenging tasks available, and thrived in his creation of the awesome new Flexifilter module, a powerful tool that allows site builders to create highly customizable filters and coders with a simple, clean API to work with. He also created improvements to the Workflow-NG module, including creating an admin interface for Workflow-NG's state machine API, and a new Workflow-NG logging module with views support. In addition to all this, he wrote a module that automatically configures TinyMCE, letting users skip the tedious install process for the TinyMCE module. Finally, he updated the FAQ Ask module to Drupal 6 and wrote some uninstallation code for several modules. Wow!
• boombatower wrote the awesome new Click HeatMap module, which provides integration between Drupal and the ClickHeat library, and also created a Git back-end for Version Control API, which will eventually help open up the doors for using additional revision control systems with Project module.
• cwgordon7 wrote an awesome patch for the core taxonomy module to make synonyms more useful in freetagging vocabularies, both by suggesting the base term in the drop-down autoselect field when a synonym is entered, as well as reverting synonyms to their base terms upon submission.
• kourge confirmed that the awesome Drupal autocomplete throbber was a problem in Safari 2, and wrote some uninstallation code for several modules.
• ezyang modified the API module (which powers http://api.drupal.org/) to show documentation of global variables, created an awesome Mercurial back-end for Version Control API, which will be another option in the future for use with Project module, coded massive improvements to the Coder Format module, added workflow-ng support to Content Access module, and created a patch to provide international phone support to the CCK Phone module. Whew!
• ap0c0lyps3 created a great new Small business profile that is in the queue for Drupal 7.
• Smartys ported the Text Captcha module to Drupal 6.
• VooEak has done great work on a Google Chart API wrapper module.
• Placinta ported the event module to Drupal 6. The event module is used by many community sites, including groups.drupal.org.
• mwrochna added theme template support to the Drupal 6 FAQ module, and an escape mechanism to Glossary module.
• Mgccl added Odeo and PodcastAlley support to Embedded audio field module.
• fwalch ported Menu Tree module to Drupal 6.

Quality Assurance

• Corsix also wrote awesome SimpleTests for the CCK module, in order to ensure that this very important module maintains its high quality.
• Speaking of SimpleTest, boombatower wrote many awesome SimpleTests for the core BlogAPI, Book, Comment, Content Translation, Filter, and Path modules.
• Smartys followed up with some SimpleTests for Forum module, and cwgordon7 threw in some Actions and Trigger SimpleTests for good measure.
• andrei.ruse added Doxygen documentation to the FAQ and Avatar Selection modules in order to help with quality assurance.
• Speaking of Doxygen documentation, ezyang added it to the coder and lightbox v2 modules. Doxygen documentation is important because it allows other developers to look at the code and easily tell how it works.
• CorniI compiled benchmark results between Drupal 5.x and Drupal 6.x.

Documentation

• DanW contrasted and compared and came up with a comparison table of all WYWISYG editors for Drupal. This should be highly useful to anyone taking on this battle in Drupal 7.
• birdmanx35 wrote awesome documentation for the new flexifilter module, and posted it to the Drupal handbooks, along with some awesome tutorials for panels 2. 
• kourge did an awesome job updating and improving the audio module's flash player theming documentation, and also created an extremely useful Core Hooks Cheatsheet to help developers to understand the module system.
• boombatower took what he learned from his SimpleTest work and created an awesome presentation about SimpleTest module, emphasizing its use in quality assurance.
• TimRogersCool created a presentation on the awesome power of open source software and how, in particular, it could help his school.
• Ron Williams researched and documented options for migrating database changes in Drupal.
• danielskeenan wrote an awesome, helpful review of multisite management tools.
• jcrawfordor researched and authored an awesome, comprehensive analysis of Drupal's 2007 security issues and recommendations.
• kyl191 whipped up some great documentation on Views arguments. With awesome screenshots, even!
• dstelljes created an awesome recipe for an extracurricular website.
• kourge compared and contrasted various cck/taxonomy modules, and posted awesome reviews and conclusions.
• philipw documented the awesome asset module.
• ddcc produced an excellent CVS Cheat Sheet to help new developers (or even experienced ones) learn their way around the system.
• Corsix documented the tricky subject of wildcard replacements in Drupal 6 menu items. 

Videos

• linuxlover101 made an amazing screencast about how to setup an e-commerce website with Ubercart.
• birdmanx35 created a screencast showing how to use Panels 2, and another video on Drupal 6's multisite features.

User Interface/Theming

• cwgordon7 created a patch to make the project module's user interface be more intuitive and awesome. Drupal.org itself depends on the project module.
• kourge created a patch to add an "update available" indicator to the modules page.
• DanW updated the awesome BlueBreeze theme to Drupal 6.
• ThatPerson created an awesome new Drupal theme, Bluecurve.
• boombatower created an awesome patch to convert the classic Bluemarine theme to a tableless layout. Let's hope this can land in Drupal 7 and eliminate layout tables for good. :D

Marketing

• boombatower created an awesome 30-second Drupal commercial.
• kourge created a gorgeous presentation about Drupal 6's best new features.
• luciasoneil created Drupal-branded presentation slide masters and then kourge made an awesome new S5 theme out of them.
• TimRogersCool made an excellent presentation about Drupal 6's most awesome modules.

That's a wrap!

In closing, huge thanks go out to:

• Google, particularly the awesome Leslie Hawthorn, for thinking up this awesome concept and for choosing the awesome Drupal project as one of the awesome open source projects to help with the awesome initial pilot program.
• Each and every single student who participated in the GHOP program, particularly those who chose Drupal as an open source project to work with: this contest would never have been such an amazing success without you! You all showed tremendous knowledge and skill, capability and willingness to learn, incredible attention to detail and quality of your work, and were just plain fun to hang out with. You rock!
• The dedicated, awesome GHOP administrators, including Addison Berry, Angie Byron, Dmitri G, and Adam Light, for administering this awesome program which has helped Drupal so much!
• Everyone who mentored tasks and helped review students' work. You all helped attract the fantastic students who came to Drupal, and kept the contest humming along. Excellent, awesome work!

Hope to see you all around on the DROP site. :)