@newbazz, no worries about pinging frequently. It's just that it's the weekend and probably most folks in the community are spending time away from their keyboards
As for being a part of our "organization", you have spoken up here and started talking to other Plone users and developers. That's pretty much the only credentials we have or need. You are as much a part of the Plone community as any of us. To answer your earlier question about mentors being selected, we are not participating in the Google Code-In. We do, however, participate every year in the Summer of Code. We are in the process of working on ideas for this year's GSoC. You can find the ideas that have been proposed by other members of the Plone family here on this site. They all have "GSoC 2018 Ideas" in the title and are tagged with "gsoc", "brainstorm" and "discussion". Read through a few of those posts, develop and share your opinions. The more you speak up, the more you are one of us
Finalized list of GSoC Projects?
Not yet. You will see it by the end of February.
There are a few projects which need much discussion before finalizing..
As @cewing already pointed that out
We will have a finalized list in a month or so @newbazz. Late January is the deadline for GSoC organizations to apply to the program, and we will have a list finalized before that. Keep your eyes on our plone.org GSoC webpage for the new list of ideas. It will appear there when we are ready to go.
In the meantime, do not hesitate to express opinions about any of the brainstorming posts we are actively discussing. Your input can be a valuable addition to our discussion, and will help you to become more aware of the way the Plone community works.
There are two approaches to the Plone theme issue:
Designing a theme from scratch
Porting an existing HTML template
Ideally the right candidate is someone with a good deal of knowledge on the frontend side of things. The type of person who is studying at university after doing some other graphics/computer career. Perhaps having more experience than solely "leaning" on a framework like bootstrap/foundation/materialize. In other words, starting the project with more than a year of design experience is a huge advantage.
I don't know if 2 - 3 months is enough time to learn design skills and implement enough and deliver a reasonable theme. I've outlined what I think are the requirements for a minimum theme in a previous post (see: Defining a Minimum Viable Plone Theme Standard (A proposal))
What you'll need to learn
Regardless of which approach you take you'll need to learn:
Diazo and probably a bit of XSLT (there are enough examples now in the wild, plus a mentor could help to curate the ones)
What is needed for a complete theme (see link minimum viable Plone theme mentioned above)
Preferred Previous Experience
Depending on which approach I think it would be preferable if you know the following BEFORE the start of GSoC in April/May.
Designing a Theme from Scratch: What you need to know
Designing a Plone theme from scratch requires the following prerequisites:
You already have strong frontend (CSS/HTML/JS) skills and are up to date with principles of responsive design
You have a strong understanding of both the elements and principles of design
Basic (not super) coding skill, enough to help yourself
Porting an existing HTML template: What you need to know
If you're porting a theme you still need to have a good understanding of frontend skills but you'll probably be able to get away with less design experience.
