0.2.1: Gearing Up is out! Some of the new stuff in this release is easy to show off, like all the media formats we're supporting. We've got ascii (whoo, old school!) to go along with the video which you may remember we were pretty jazzed about adding in the last release. (http://mediagoblin.org/news/mediagoblin-0.2.0-our-tubes.html) You have to specifically enable it, so see the documentation (http://docs.mediagoblin.org/media-types.html#ascii-art) for details. In the future, you can expect to see support for all sorts of media types, including 3d models, slides, and presentations!
There are plenty of nice UI tweaks, including nice tidy-looking comment areas and the ability to favorite media. You can now easily apply Creative Commons licenses (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/) to your Media Goblin media.
We're now able to provide a customizable EXIF metadata display. EXIF data (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EXIF) means all the little tags that modern media recording devices include inside your image files. If your camera records it, you can display it; temperature, location, camera manufacturer -- whatever you like. If you took a sideways picture (and your camera is fancy enough to detect it) then MediaGoblin will rotate your image in the right direction for you. The default setting is hidden (but not scraped) metadata. Since this is Media Goblin, you can do whatever you want to on your instance -- just turn on exif_visible option in mediagoblin.ini
GPS support is working. Does your camera have a GPS in it? Then you can haz maps. We worked hard to build compatibility with another great FLOSS project; OpenStreetMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org). Again, this feature is off by default. You can enable option geolocation_map_visible in your mediagoblin.ini to show GPS info.
What about "under the hood" news? If MediaGoblin were a car we were building from scratch, then we recently decided to replace the engine. After significant discussion, we decided to switch from MongoDB to SQL using the python SQLAlchemy library. The SQL code is actually already very close to full deployment in the main repository and many parts have already performed well in tests. Huge props are due to Elrond who has taken on this Herculean task! He's also done some great roadmapping for everyone else's who's pitched in on the Great Database Migration of 2012. The transition is already well on its way!
We're smoothing the way for federation. Kuneco is the collection of libraries we're building so that OStatus, the software that drives our inspiring forebears identi.ca, will play nicely with python webapps. We also implemented PubSubHubbub (push) support in this release. We can now "push" notifications of our feeds out to the PubSubHubbub servers. One small step towards federation, in a series of many steps that will one day add up to a large step.
MediaGoblin is coming soon to every device we can think of! We want your phones, desktop applications and tablets to be able to submit media. We're putting together an API that will allow programmers to hook their applications into MediaGoblin. One day we'll be part of a massive decentralized ether and having a great API for interoperability is one way we start to get there.
So much amazing work happened to make this release possible! We could not have done without all of our amazing people. People worked over the holidays. Their paid jobs said, "Hey take a break this month." and our contributors took that time off and gifted it to the 0.2.1 release. We're now in a great place to start building federation. Contributor thanks list [Chris will fill in, and you can leave this out when forwarding it to the media]
Get on board! MediaGoblin is actively seeking testers, translators coders and bug filers. We'll save you a seat as we set out on on the road to federation! The MediaGoblin Team