Major Description
In a new Allura installation, the landing page is not very useful. It shows a defunct category system on the left menu and the body of the page is just a list of the "neighborhoods" (which you can browse into to find projects). This is not great initial impression.
The categories should be removed, and the main page content should be customizable. Some design research and brainstorming will be necessary to determine what it should be. Maybe raw HTML that site admins can set, maybe a standard allura wiki page. Maybe an option to redirect to a "main" project within the site. Maybe the root is its own special project, allowing admins to choose between a wiki page, forum, tracker, etc - plus let them have other tools at the top level.
This probably will not take the full GSoC time and the student should plan on other improvements to make the Allura site easier for people to use and customize. (header/footer customizations maybe?)