Whenever Joomla gets picked as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) candidate there is a flurry of activity around several projects. In 2022 one of the projects put forward was Guided Tours. This is a project that has been tackled by several students over several years and each one has nudged closer to the finishing line, but never quite got there. That's why it's especially gratifying to see Guided Tours as the main feature of the Joomla 4.3 release. It's the culmination of a lot of teamwork and a great example of what can be achieved if you just keep at it.
The third and final GSoC student to work on Guided Tours
Khushi Rauniyar was the student to pick up that baton and run with the project. Khushi was one of several in the 2022 GSoC intake and she worked with a few mentors to help expand on the work that went before, rewriting and hitting the hard issues that had eluded the students who had come before.
The development continued all last summer and towards the end of the summer, Khushi came to Joomla London and demonstrated the feature to all the developers there. There was a lot of praise as well as some good constructive feedback on how it could be improved, and a list of features developers would like to see.
Hear it from the student herself
I am Khushi Rauniyar, a 2022 graduate and Software Development Engineer at Amazon.
I came across the Joomla organisation after hearing about it from previous GSoC students in 2021.
I really liked the idea of contributing to a live project. Solving an issue and writing code which can be used by millions of users excited me. So I started contributing to the organisation, fixing bugs, and testing pull requests. Then, in 2022, I learned that year's GSoC projects through an online seminar and I decided to participate in it with Joomla!
I took on board the Guided Tour project. I was the third person working on it. Shivam Rajput had started the whole guided tours off and then the year before me Jatin Salve worked on the project.