Welcome our summer of code students

Welcome PHP is very pleased to announce that seven students have been chosen for the Google 'Summer of Code'. Through this project, Google provides student developers with a stipend to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects like PHP. The students are each mentored by members of our community, who will look after the students and their projects step by step. Nonetheless I would like to ask everybody else to kindly help these students, too. The projects, their students and their assigned mentors are as follows: PDF PECL extension Lauris Bukšis-Haberkorns, mentored by Michael Wallner phpAspect Candillon William, mentored by Sebastian Bergman PHP Macro Preprocessor Pavlo Shelyazhenko, mentored by Marcus Boerger Quality Assurance GCOV website Daniel Pronych, mentored by Nuno Lopes Livedocs - making DocBook less painful, and manuals more useful Philip Olson, mentored by Ilia Alshanetsky New package to read, create or modify OpenDocument files Alexander Pak, mentored by Lukas Smith DML support: an improvement to PEAR::MDB2_Schema Igor Feghali, mentored by Lukas Smith As soon as all the formalities are settled Google will make the full project descriptions public here http://code.google.com/soc/php/about.html. Until then, I suggest that all 'our' students introduce themselves and their projects in a separate mail thread. Unfortunately the number of people who participated in the ranking and selecting of the projects and students has been limited, and the whole process couldn't be made transparent until now due to the terms and conditions of the project. The mentors will take care of the php.net structural formalities where necessary, and in that regard the projects should be regarded as projects of their respective mentors with the help of a friend. Personally I am very happy that Google offered php.net the opportunity to participate in the Summer of Code 2006, and am looking forward to working with my student. Hopefully everybody can join in and give a bit of advice or constructive criticism where appropriate.