Can you believe we’ve only been working on MediaGoblin since March? The biggest news is that 0.1.0 is out! We want to take a few minutes to look back at how far we’ve come and how many people have been supportive and how many folks have become contributors. With all the excitement and positivity, you’d think we were shipping out bushels of free candy instead of building a free as in freedom media-hosting site. Fortunately, there are lots of folks who agree that a decentralized web is even better than a pillow case full of sugary treats.

We’ve completely redone the main website. We even have a new tour page! Thanks so much to Jef van Schendel for making our website a thing of beauty (and to Alex Camelio for adding the cute icons on the frontpage). Go ahead and check it out! Seriously, we’ll be right here when you return.

You may find it invigorating to look at our Alpha goals to see how far we’ve come. While there are a few things we didn’t get to (CAPTCHAs and featured works) but there are many more big ideas that we were able to turn into reality. We have a sophisticated “unframework” which is working beautifully for our needs. We have a great, consistent (and dare I say suave?) theme. We have an abstracted storage system which already is being used to interface with OpenStack’s Swift storage system. Comments and tagging are working. We’re also well on our way toward supporting multiple media types. We are living the dream and the reality is even better than we’d expected. Welcome to our alpha release!

As we get ready to start coding up federation, aka world domination, we added brand-new deployment documentation — take a look! Better yet, install it and let us know how it went. Last month we added cross site request forgery protection and lost password functionality. There was some significant internal restructuring this month as we gear up for caching and supporting more media types in the next release or so. The translations crew continues to amaze us with their volume and diligence. Watch out world, here we come.

Thanks to all our contributors! Aaron Williamson, Alejandro Villanueva, Alex Camelio, Caleb Forbes Davis V, Christopher Allan Webber, Deb Nicholson, Elrond of Samba TNG, Jef van Schendel, Jim Campbell, Joar Wandborg, Nathan Yergler, Sam Kleinman, Shawn Khan, Thorsten Wilms, Will Kahn-Greene… this month’s release wouldn’t have happened without your help!

What’s around the corner? For one thing, video is nearing usability:



(Image from Sintel by the Blender Institute, released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported)

and the exciting work on federation is in planning. We’ve got lots of small bugs for folks who are new to python, larger tasks for folks who want to immerse themselves in the challenge of federation and we are actively seeking opinionated web users to give us feedback on our test site. Join us on the journey!