While I have been working on CPG 1.5, I recently started recoding some plugins and writing new ones. One of the major things that have been coded is the addition of quite a lot plugin hooks. While sometimes it is easier to create a mod (modifying the core code) then a plugin (no changes needed in the core), it does pay to create the plugin. It is easier to maintain and certainly easier to support. Plugins are portable when doing an upgrade, while modifications have to be applied everytime.
It is possible to convert every mod to a plugin in the 1.4 series, but it certainly was not always efficient. You could/can use the ‘page_html’ filter to change every aspect of Coppermine if you want to, but it would be quite resource intensive. Now with the additional hooks I was able to create a plugin to add an alternate CAPTCHA then the default one built in. I was also able to convert my lightbox mod to a plugin with the addition of an administration menu, no need to edit the files anymore!
It would be nice to see people convert their mods to plugins as it is more likely they will work on future versions of the 1.5 branch and possibly even after that.
I think over 90% of the mods currently available are convertable without to much hassle. It does take some time to get used to the plugin API, but there are enough plugins available to peek at their code and see how it works. The 1.5 plugin documentation is currently being improved, and I will add all my plugins in there with detailed info on how I wrote them.
This year Coppermine participated in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the second time. Since our students and mentors did a great job, 2 devs were invited to attend the Mentor Summit at Google HQ in Mountain View on October 25th and 26st. Thu and myself were the lucky chosen ones to represent Coppermine over there.
The GSoC Mentor Summit is a unique opportunity for project members to meet people from other projects. It is a place where we can collaborate on the thing we like most: Open Source Software.
Before the summit started, Thu invited me for lunch at Google (where she works). This was really great; to meet someone I had known for over a year on the Coppermine team & forums but never seen before.
Saturday, 25th of October, the summit started with writing down what we wanted to talk about and put those notes on a schedule. After some fiddling around with the schedule, we could finally start sharing ideas. There were quite some rooms available where each hour we could hold/attend a session. There were sessions about GSoC and how it could be improved, teaching open source development in university settings, open source security, CMS & LMS eLearning and a lot more.
My favorite was a session about how CMS’s and other software can learn from each other. We talked about how working closer together and trying to come up with a standard naming convention. Possibility for CMS’s to import/export a standards compliant file so it would be possible to switch to another CMS whenever you want.
Of course one hour most of the time is too short to finish a session, but you get the ball rolling and continue to talk and take action after the summit is over.
When sessions were over I talked (and especially listened) to people from other projects. It is really great to hear we all encounter the same difficulties in managing our projects & communities 
