Welcome to MediaGoblin 0.7.0: Time Traveler’s Delight! It’s been longer than usual for our releases, but we assure you this is because we’ve been traveling back and forth across the timeline picking up cool technology that spans a wide spectrum of space and time. But our time-boat has finally come into the harbor. Get ready… we’ve got a lot of cargo to unpack!

You may remember the work we are doing towards federation, and even the demo we showed earlier of that progress.

Sorry, this video will not work because your web browser does not support HTML5 video.

You can get a modern web browser that can play this video at http://getfirefox.com!

Well we’re excited to announce that the first piece towards MediaGoblin federation has landed! We don’t have server-to-server federation working yet, but we do have the first parts of the Pump API in place: you can now use the Pump API as a media upload API! Are you a python developer? Starting a client couldn’t be easier now, using PyPump! We also have a whole new section of our docs about the Pump API. There’s of course more Pump related things to come in future releases, but we’re excited to be well on our way!



Our new theme Sandy 70s Speedboat looks great on galleries…

Sailing into this release is an excellent new theme from Jeremy Pope: Sandy 70s Speedboat! This retro-styled, light colored theme has just enough frills to make your site look good while emphasizing the real stuff you want to show off… your media!



… and on individual media, too!

MediaGoblin is now using the skeleton CSS system, making it more responsive. MediaGoblin sites now adaptively fit better into a variety of resolutions, including mobile phones, across the board. (Responsive design is the thing all the cool kids are into these days right?) Now MediaGoblin is much nicer to look at on the go!



Now more responsive!

We also have a new blogging media type. However, it’s very experimental and could use more testing and careful code review… but if you’re interested in testing and helping out in this area, check it out!

In addition, we have a number of features that have come in thanks to work from a grant to improve MediaGoblin in use with galleries, libraries, archival institutions, and museums. The first of these features is something people have long wanted: the ability for site administrators/curators to “feature” media to appear on the frontpage of a site.

We also now have a tool for command line bulk uploading that has come in through this grant work. Do you already have a set of media and you need to pull into a MediaGoblin instance? You can now use the command line bulk upload tool to automate pulling in that media, including setting metadata.

Wait, metadata? What do we mean by that? Well, what if you want to store some extra information about some work? (What year was this painting done in? If the author was different than the uploader, who was the original author? And many other things!) Now you can associate this information easily with media that you are uploading. With the appropriate plugin enabled, this information is viewable to the user… but it’s also machine readable. Now even robots can appreciate the cultural works on your MediaGoblin site!

For site administrators, we also have two new subcommands: “deletemedia” and “deleteusers”. Whew! Now you can get that cruft that shouldn’t be there off your site in an automated manner!

There are many other fixes and improvements in this release… too many to detail! But some highlights are: the long-hated “video thumbnails not generating” bug is fixed, many improvements to translations, fixes to the PDF media type, new default permissions options for the config file, new template hooks for plugins, and much, much more!

Whew… that sure is a lot! It’s good to see that our time travel madness has paid off in a bounty of fixes and improvements. In the meanwhile, this release was a huge group effort (as always!) so let’s thank our contributors for all their hard work: Aditi Mittal, Aleksej Serdjukov, Alon Levy, Amirouche Boubekki, Andrew Browning, Berker Peksag, Beuc, Boris Bobrov, Brett Smith, Christopher Allan Webber, Deb Nicholson, Elrond (of Samba TNG), Jessica Tallon, Jiyda Mint Moussa, Jeremy Pope, Laura Arjona Reina, Loïc Le Ninan, Matt Molyneaux, Natalie Foust-Pilcher, Odin Hørthe Omdal, Rodney Ewing, Rodrigo Rodrigues da Silva, Sergio Durigan Junior, Sebastian Spaeth, Sebastian Hugentobler, and Tryggvi Björgvinsson. Thanks so much everyone… we really couldn’t do it without you!

Stay tuned for more. We’ve got more cargo that’s shipping its way on in for the next release… we’d better get back to work! In the meanwhile, enjoy this release and be sure to check the release notes. And if you’re interested in joining our crew, we’d love to have you on board, so please do join us!

Happy travels, everyone!

Update: Are you upgrading from a previous version of GNU MediaGoblin? The release notes left out a step (now corrected)… you should also run the command “git submodule init && git submodule update”. Otherwise you’ll be missing out on the “skeleton” CSS framework and things will look really weird! Not to mention the sandy 70s speedboat theme! If you’re doing a new install, this won’t be a problem.