Development/Summer of Code/2023/BookBrainz
This page will discuss the current list of suggested ideas for students to develop proposals for Google's Summer of Code for BookBrainz. If you're a student, feel free to base your proposal on one of these ideas, or pick and entirely new idea that you think might be useful to us.
Getting Started
(see also: Getting started with GSoC)
The first thing to do to get started with BookBrainz is to get familiar with the website and start editing (the help page and user guide are good starting points).
We also have a testing website at test.bookbrainz.org with its own separate database. You can create an account there and use it to get familiar with the website and database without fear of adding inadequate data.
The next step is to clone the bookbrainz-site GitHub repository, and follow our developer documentation to get the site up and running on your computer.
When you feel ready to try your hand on some bugs, we have “good first bug” category on our ticket tracker: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/issues/?filter=11910
Come and speak to us in the BookBrainz IRC (Libera.Chat/#bookbrainz) if you finish all of that, or get stuck at any point!
Ideas
Here are some suggestions of projects that would improve BookBrainz. Of course, suggestion means you're not limited to these ideas and can propose your own if after using BookBrainz you find a substantial area you can improve.
Import the (now defunct) Bookogs database
Proposed Mentors: Monkey
Languages/skills: SQL, Node.js, knowledge of BookBrainz schema
Estimated Project Length: 350 hours
Difficulty: hard
Expected outcomes: A back-end system to parse and import large scale databases, importing Bookogs
The sites Bookogs and Comicogs, sister projects of Discogs, have been closed in 2020; some editors elected BookBrainz to continue contributing open data.
The Bookogs database dumps were made publicly available for download in json format right after the closing of the project. In order to prevent the loss of Bookogs contributions we want to import all the entries from the database dumps, as discussed in this thread.
This will require processing very large json files in a robust manner, creating "adapters" to transform entities from one database schema to the other, allowing for repeating the process without duplicating entries. You will put together a detailed plan fo action ahead of time
Discussions are in progress for matching roles, formats and genres to BookBrainz' schema.
Administration system
Proposed Mentors: Monkey
Languages/skills: Node.js, SQL, ExpressJS
Estimated Project Length: 175 hours
Difficulty: easy
Expected outcomes: A usable administration system with arbitrary levels of privileges
BookBrainz currently has no administration system, or any good way of giving users special privileges.
This certainly needs to change!
For this project, you will be devising and implementing a basic admin system allowing for a flexible privilege hierarchy.
This will require at minimum:
- Modifying the database schema, adding at least:
- a table to define roles
- a table to attach users to roles
- Implementing a simple admin panel webpage to allow admins to search for users, give users privileges and take other actions
- Middleware for securing specific routes according to a user's roles:
- admins can view the admin panel
- admins can block or deleted abusive users
- privileged editors can edit relationships and identifiers
- privileged editors can trigger a reindex of the search server
Extended goals:
- a page to allow privileged users to edit and add relationships and identifiers
- a public log of administration actions (see for example the CritiqueBrainz admin log)
