Google contest ignores Christmas break

While most of the SilverStripe core team were at the beach, having a barbeque in their backyard, or on a bush walk over the past few weeks, by contrast the 60 students involved with SilverStripe in the Google Highly Open Participation Contest have produced a horde of work, leaving us feeling guilty for taking the time off!

In particular, as you can tell from their task lists, New Zealander Simon Welsh, Wojtek Szkutnik of Poland, and Californian Jeff Chan are racing through tasks.

New themes:

• Maori theme by João of Portugal
• Curiously Green by darek of Canada
  
• Mintswirl by Draicone of Australia
  

New code:

• Google Adsense widget by Ryan Rymax.
• Google Custom Search widget by Samiam14.
• LastFM widget by sharntehnub.
• Ohloh Contribution widget by Simon Welsh.
• PayPal donation widget by Simon Welsh.
• Module to embargo/expire pages by Simon Welsh.
  

Check these out at the widgets download page and provide feedback and suggestions in the forum... 

Dozens of other contributions:

• Tutorials updated to reflect the latest version of SilverStripe
• Polish, Finnish and Esperanto translations
• Websites for non-profit organisations launched
• Browser bugs (IE6, Opera, Safari) for us to solve
• Confirmation that SilverStripe's multilanguage capability works with right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hewbrew.
• Manual testing of the installer to improve reliability

You can be involved, too!

There's still a month more to be involved, so if you are a high school student keen to get involved, there's still lots of time to choose tasks and work on them.

We've already doubled the number of challenges we thought would be needed for the contest, and will continue to add more tasks as they get snapped up.