MediaGoblin’s newest release is here, 0.4.0! We’ve got a whole lot of cool things, most excitingly document support and an improved plugin infrastructure. Now more than ever before MediaGoblin has the tooling to become a real library of knowledge. Sounds exciting? Read on!



Cory Doctorow‘s Little Brother being shown in MediaGoblin

First of all, let’s talk about document support. Coded by MediaGoblin contributor and user Alon Levy, this new media type is pretty awesome: it uses the hyper-awesome pdf.js to display documents in the browser.

What kind of documents? Well, not just PDFs… if your server has LibreOffice installed it can convert most document types LibreOffice can read. (And yes, both the original document and the PDF will be available for download!) From ebooks to journal articles to conference presentations, MediaGoblin can show it all.

We’ve got a new plugin system! Almost anything is possible now in our new system, and indeed, much of our summer projects will be relying on this new infrastructure.

Interested in working on a plugin? Check our plugin writing docs, and if you need new hooks added, please don’t hesitate to talk to us.

A nice new feature: we now have human readable timestamps! Instead of just saying the date and time, it tells you how long ago they were taken. However, it’s easy enough to still see the date and time something was uploaded; just hover over it! Additionally, if a photo has metadata about when it was taken, that can be displayed in addition to the time it was uploaded. Pretty cool, yeah?

There’s a good number of other features worth mentioning briefly: you can configure whether or not you want to allow comments in your config now, and we have an experimental Piwigo compatible API plugin. (Very experimental, but some people have managed to get photo uploading with Shotwell!) And, as always, there are many, many under the hood improvements.

So what’s coming up? Now that our plugin API is more refined, expect to see more cool plugins coming up in the future. And most excitingly, we’ve got six full time interns this summer from Google Summer of Code / GNOME Outreach Program for Women who are working on some awesome projects this summer. The plan was that once plugin infrastructure wrapped up that we’d move on to federation work, and indeed this is moving forward with Jessica Tallon’s work to add support for the Pump API to MediaGoblin. So we’ve got a lot of exciting stuff on the horizon!

Thanks to everyone who made this release possible: Aditi Mittal, Aeva Ntsc, Alon Levy, Brett Smith, Christopher Allan Webber, Deb Nicholson, David Thompson, Duncan Patterson, Elrond of Samba TNG, Gabi Thume, Gabriel Saldana, Hans Lo, Jessica T, Joar Wandborg, Mats Sjöberg, Mike Linksvayer, Nathan Yergler, Natalie Foust-Pilcher, Praveen Kumar, Rodney Ewing, Sam Tuke, Sebastian Spaeth, Simon Fondrie-Teitler, and Tryggvi Björgvinsson! You all rock. MediaGoblin couldn’t happen without the hard work of people like you!

This was a jam-packed release, and we couldn’t mention everything, so be sure as always to check out the release notes, especially if you’re upgrading. Now get out there and have some fun goblin’ing it up… and if you want to join our quest to improve the sharing of knowledge and spreading user freedom across the net, we’d love to have you!