It has been about a month now since the Open Source version of MediaCore was rebranded as "MediaCore CE" and I got commit access.
I'd like to summarize the development activity in 2012. Hopefully I find the time to write such a summary regularly in the future.
Executive Summary: Development is going again, many fixes and some new features in the current dev version. Major changes being implemented within the next 2-3 months.
Project Risks: In 2012 I was only active developer of MediaCore CE which is not a comfortable situation for a project. However I continuously get new customer requests about MediaCore so I'm positive that I can spend more time/develop new features in the future. Also I'd welcome useful patches/additions from anyone!
Long version:
I groomed my private git repositories and pushed many fixes/changes which I developed previously. There are still several features not in the public repo but these will take some time because I have to evaluate if they are useful for MediaCore CE as a whole and/or clean the code.
I created a preview version of the release notes where all the items are explained in more detail (some with additional screenshots).
- Ability to Import Complete YouTube Channels: In the admin settings interface you can now import complete YouTube channels instead of individual videos only.
- Python 2.4 Support restored
- Improved Video Embed Code compatibility: Some third-party software like WordPress was confused by the self-closing <iframe /> tags in the video embed code. Even though technically this tag is perfectly fine by the HTML spec, we changed the embed code so it uses more "traditional" <iframe ...></iframe> tags.
- Removed Necessity for a Local Mail (SMTP) Server
- More Configuration Options for the YouTube Player
- Custom Head Tags: You can now add arbitrary tags to the HTML <head> section
- Added Thumbnails for Default Media: When you create a new MediaCore instance, you will get real thumbnails for the default media.
- JavaScript License Change to MIT: The license for the front-end (public) JavaScript code is now licensed under the MIT license to remove a potential GPL license violation (as of Feb 13 2012 we still have a few files pending relicensing but I expect that to happen within the next weeks.
- Support for non-compiled Players: Players with custom client-side JavaScript don't have be added to mcore-compiled.js anymore.
Bug fixes:
- Could not add YouTube videos which had no description
- Prevent "duplicate content" rating by Google (bad sitemap.xml)
- Could not disable 'sitemaps' and 'rss feed' at the same time in admin
- Prevent exception if user agent does not specify an acceptable format for sitemap.xml/RSS feed. This prevented some bots from spidering the MediaCore sitemap.
How to use the development version:
If you want to have the new features before a real release (which is still some months away as it will be a major release), I advise you to clone the git repository and add your changes in a git branch which you can rebase regularly to the latest master. Also please read the release notes (see above) and git changelogs carefully. Please be prepared to handle/report bugs as the development version received less testing than the currently released 0.9.1.
Further plans (1-3 months):
- I'll update the translations soon.
- Create a new demo instance for MediaCore since SimpleStation had to shut down the old one on http://mediacorecommunity.org/demo
- Create (video?) tutorials for MediaCore installation and multi-site MediaCore installs and write an more complete post on custom players
- Update FlowPlayer to the latest release version
- Set up a Continuous Integration server to find defects faster
- Currently I'm working on a bigger MediaCore feature which will provide the foundations to a lot of more "advanced" MediaCore use cases, closing the feature gap to the cloud version a little bit.
Disclaimer: Due to customer requests and project issues the list above is pure speculation. You can ensure that these things happen by contracting me.
I also assembled a personal wishlist with things that I want to change in MediaCore. However many of these items won't be implemented within the next year unless there is substantial funding from customers.
How you can help:
- check github forks for useful patches (see call for action)
- Update Translations: I'll push a new translation template to Transifex within the next week
