MediaGoblin 0.0.5 "Visions of the Future" released!

[Christopher Allan Webber]

A bit late sending the notice here, we actually pushed out this release
a few weeks ago, but it's an exciting one.

For those of you who don't know, GNU MediaGoblin is a recent and rather
exciting GNU project all about decentralized media publication on the
web.  We're already pretty far along as a general social image gallery
replacement, and there are several features we're gunning for of I think
particular excitement: federation (via OStatus), multiple media types
(yes, soon we'll have a standards-compliant FOSS replacement for
YouTube/Vimeo/etc, and very soon you'll be able to extend it with your
own ounique media types... I'm hoping to support 3d model viewing, etc).
0.1.0 will be out very shortly, and we'll start paving the path toward
such a glorious future soon.  Oh yeah, and we're written in Python!

The better version of this release is available at:
http://mediagoblin.org/news/version-0.0.5--visions-of-the-future.html
... that version includes pretty screenshots and etc.  But for those of
you who insist on a plaintext release, here's a dump from the
restructured text blogpost below.  Enjoy!

---------------

Version 0.0.5 - Visions of the Future
#published 2011-09-02 09:00
#author Deb Nicholson

.. image:: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_banner.png

The whole world is invited to our vision of the future. You know the
one with decentralized services, open standards and customized media
hosting?  In preparation for the whole world, also known as our
imminent public instance, we asked for more contributors, and boy did
we get them!  We also managed to further our internal vision a bit by
making great strides on our migration and storage plans. This may have
been our most exciting month yet, especially if you go by the lengthy
list of thank yous!

uchoMay ogressPray!
`Transifex is fully set up to handle translations 
<https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/mediagoblin/resource/mediagoblin/>`_
and MediaGoblin has already been translated into 14 languages.*  (If you
can help us by translating another, we'd be very grateful!)

.. image:: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_translated_login-scaled.png
   :alt: Login screen, translated!
   :target: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_translated_login.png

We've started conducting user experience testing -- many thanks to all
the folks who responded to our call for testing! Caleb Davis is
graciously hosting and running MediaGoblin's user experience testing
server. We'll be `collecting new data each month here 
<http://wiki.mediagoblin.org/User_Experience>`_. Got opinions?  We'd
absolutely love to hear them.  Please ping us if you want in on the UX
testing party.

There are a few new goodies for the users this time around, including
the ability to delete media, and some smaller things (like now if you
submitted an image wider than 640 pixels, clicking on the scaled down
image brings you to the original size).

.. image:: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_delete_media-scaled.png
   :alt: Screenshot of deleting media
   :target: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_delete_media.png

We're also supporting media attachments as an optional (but not
enabled-by-default for security reasons) feature.  Assuming you're on
a site that supports it, you can now attach source files to your
works, etc.

.. image:: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_attachment-scaled.png
   :alt: Screenshot of downloading an attachment
   :target: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_attachment.png

The internal roadmap also got some nurturing in the form of
media-processing changes, a new site export/import tool as well as
docs and wiki improvements. On the literally visual front, we made
some progress on our logo and there's a new favicon. You can also take
a look at our new tidied up homepage:

.. image:: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_homepage_and_favicon-scaled.png
   :alt: New welcoming homepage and a favicon
   :target: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_homepage_and_favicon.png

Loads of storage stuff! We're now compatible with
`OpenStack's "swift" file storage system <http://swift.openstack.org/>`_,
(so you can use
`Rackspace CloudFiles 
<http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/>`_,
for example, or connect to some other instance of the software) and we
worked on an experimental "MountStorage" system for mounting multiple
storage systems at once. (Sorry, there are no pictures of the storage
systems.) You can however take a look at our improved 404 (not found)
and 500 (internal server error) pages when you want something we
haven't stored where you thought we did or something breaks:

.. image:: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_404-scaled.png
   :alt: MediaGoblin 404 screenshot
   :target: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_404.png

.. image:: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_500-scaled.png
   :alt: MediaGoblin 500 screenshot
   :target: /blog_images/mediagoblin_0.0.5_500.png

We wouldn't have been able to glimpse the future without all of our
contributors, so a hearty thanks goes out to: Will Kahn-Greene, Deb
Nicholson, Joar Wandborg, Christopher Allan Webber, Jef van Schendel,
Osama Khalid, Elrond of Samba TNG, Alejandro Villanueva, Caleb Davis,
Karen Rustad, Alex Camelio, Thorsten Wilms, Jarred de Beer, Sam
Kleinman, Jim Campbell, Aleksej Serdjukov, Mark Holmquist, Jacobo
Nájera Valdez, Vinzenz Vietzke, Benjamin Lebsanft, Odin Hørthe Omdal,
Jure Repinc, Jan-Christoph Borchardt, Shawn Khan, Justin Mantell,
Jordyn Bonds, Larisa Hoffenbecker, Avery Morrow, and Transifex
usernames: lasconic, osc, harryhow, Arder, gap and aleksejrs.**

Stay tuned, because *next month* we'll be living *this* month's
future... and it looks very bright indeed!  And if you want us to help
make these dreams a reality, please
`join us <http://mediagoblin.org/pages/join.html>`_!

(\*Pig Latin is not one of them.)

(\*\*Transifex doesn't currently let us easily view translation
history. If we didn't mention you, we're sorry and we still really,
really appreciate your help!  `Drop in IRC
<http://mediagoblin.org/pages/join.html>`_ and we'll fix the error.)