The whole world is invited to our vision of the future. You know the one with decentralized services, open standards and customized media hosting? In preparation for the whole world, also known as our imminent public instance, we asked for more contributors, and boy did we get them! We also managed to further our internal vision a bit by making great strides on our migration and storage plans. This may have been our most exciting month yet, especially if you go by the lengthy list of thank yous!

uchoMay ogressPray! Transifex is fully set up to handle translations and MediaGoblin has already been translated into 14 languages.* (If you can help us by translating another, we’d be very grateful!)

We’ve started conducting user experience testing — many thanks to all the folks who responded to our call for testing! Caleb Davis is graciously hosting and running MediaGoblin’s user experience testing server. We’ll be collecting new data each month here. Got opinions? We’d absolutely love to hear them. Please ping us if you want in on the UX testing party.

There are a few new goodies for the users this time around, including the ability to delete media, and some smaller things (like now if you submitted an image wider than 640 pixels, clicking on the scaled down image brings you to the original size).

We’re also supporting media attachments as an optional (but not enabled-by-default for security reasons) feature. Assuming you’re on a site that supports it, you can now attach source files to your works, etc.

The internal roadmap also got some nurturing in the form of media-processing changes, a new site export/import tool as well as docs and wiki improvements. On the literally visual front, we made some progress on our logo and there’s a new favicon. You can also take a look at our new tidied up homepage:

Loads of storage stuff! We’re now compatible with OpenStack’s “swift” file storage system, (so you can use Rackspace CloudFiles, for example, or connect to some other instance of the software) and we worked on an experimental “MountStorage” system for mounting multiple storage systems at once. (Sorry, there are no pictures of the storage systems.) You can however take a look at our improved 404 (not found) and 500 (internal server error) pages when you want something we haven’t stored where you thought we did or something breaks:

We wouldn’t have been able to glimpse the future without all of our contributors, so a hearty thanks goes out to: Will Kahn-Greene, Deb Nicholson, Joar Wandborg, Christopher Allan Webber, Jef van Schendel, Osama Khalid, Elrond of Samba TNG, Alejandro Villanueva, Caleb Davis, Karen Rustad, Alex Camelio, Thorsten Wilms, Jarred de Beer, Sam Kleinman, Jim Campbell, Aleksej Serdjukov, Mark Holmquist, Jacobo Nájera Valdez, Vinzenz Vietzke, Benjamin Lebsanft, Odin Hørthe Omdal, Jure Repinc, Jan-Christoph Borchardt, Shawn Khan, Justin Mantell, Jordyn Bonds, Larisa Hoffenbecker, Avery Morrow, and Transifex usernames: lasconic, osc, harryhow, Arder, gap and aleksejrs.**

Stay tuned, because next month we’ll be living this month’s future… and it looks very bright indeed! And if you want us to help make these dreams a reality, please join us!

(*Pig Latin is not one of them.)

(**Transifex doesn’t currently let us easily view translation history. If we didn’t mention you, we’re sorry and we still really, really appreciate your help! Drop in IRC and we’ll fix the error.)