Do you remember when all the best superheroes were part of a team? Sometimes they had a clubhouse and went out on missions together and sometimes they actually formed one mega-super-hero. (I’m apparently on some sort of nostalgia kick this month…) Anyway, that’s basically what we’ve been doing with MediaGoblin. We want all the parts that we build to be able to do awesome stuff on their own, and be part of one huge decentralized web super-force.

In this release we move closer to federation by shifting our OAuth code to be pump.io compatible. Not only that, many of our longstanding pluginification goals were met. We are working towards a more modular web and building a very modular codebase to make it happen. (So meta!)

Firstly, authentication has completely moved over to a plugin system. Thanks go to Rodney Ewing for this awesome work! We’re now able to support multiple authentication systems including the standard login/password system,

…and OpenID…

…plus Mozilla Persona.

Maybe *your* customized login system will be next? The framework is flexible and ready for you to build on.

Secondly, all the media types are also now plugins! This means that new media types will be able to all kinds of things. We could support blog posts as a media type or a tumblr-like thing (which is in the works!). Let us know if you want to code up smell-o-vision support. (Just kidding, no one wants to smell the internet!)

The grammar goblins got their wishes granted in this release. The rest of us can use this snazzy new comment preview feature to keep from offending their delicate sensibilities.

Userland gets some nice social improvements too. You’ll get notified when someone comments on your media which means you can follow up right away if you want to.

We also eliminated some potential pain points for Admins! If you upload something and it fails mid-processing, it’s now possible to send it back to process again. Admins can also tweak media that’s already been uploaded. Want to convert a video to a new format or resize all your images? You’re going to love the new reprocessing framework. A web interface for reprocessing is coming next.

We also added support for Unicode filenames. Running an international MediaGoblin instance? You won’t have to worry about choking on non-ASCII filenames.

We are so lucky that all the best super-heroes are part of our team here at MediaGoblin. Check out all the great folks who helped make this release possible: Alon Levy, Brandon Invergo, Christopher Allan Webber, Duncan Paterson, Dan Callahan, Deb Nicholson, Emily O’Leary, Jakob Kramer, Jessica Tallon, Jim Campbell, Joar Wandborg, Kenneth Dombrowski, Kushal Kumaran, Laura Arjona, Marcel van der Boom, Natalie Foust-Pilcher, Rodney Ewing, Sam Clegg, Sebastian Spaeth, Starblessed of Viewskew (hosting help!), sturm, and Tran Thanh Bao. What a list! Thanks to everyone… we couldn’t do it without you.

We especially want to thank our meta-superheroes for this summer’s amazing output! On the intern/student side, thanks to Aditi Mittal, Emily O’Leary, Jessica Tallon, Natalie Foust, Praveen Kumar, and Rodney Ewing (RJ). On the mentoring end, thanks to Aaron Williamson, Aeva Palecek, Chris Webber, Joar Wandborg, and Sebastian Spaeth. We could not have done this without Google Summer of Code and Gnome’s Outreach Program for Women. We promise you a thorough post-summer report on our energetic mentees very soon.

Okay, excited and want to give things an install? Check out our docs! And if upgrading, be sure to read our release notes. There’s some important stuff for you to do in there… plus a more complete list of updates for this release!

Meanwhile, our mentoring schedule is about to go from breakneck to merely brisk. Maybe the upcoming 30th anniversary of GNU is inspiring you to find an exciting GNU project to contribute to? At MediaGoblin, we love new contributors! Visit us in IRC; #mediagoblin on freenode.net! Or sign up for regular updates here! Got ideas or questions about our work? Email us at press@mediagoblin.org — we look forward to hearing from you!