Development & Design Blog

Good news! We’re pushing hard for the next release. Our release schedule (tentatively) is as follows:

Release Schedule

• 0.8 alpha beta – Friday, April 23rd. This will only be available to people who have signed up as beta testers.
• 0.8 rc1 – Friday, April 30th. This will be available via our download page, beta testers will also be notified.
• 0.8 final – Friday – May 7th. This will be available via our download page. Everyone who has subscribed to the mailing list will be notified.

Front-end (User) enhancements:

• New UI – Completely redesigned front-end user interface.
• Multiple flash players – Users can now view videos in either the FlowPlayer or JWPlayer. This is set by the administrator
• HTML 5 video players – Using the new HTML5 video players can make a MediaCore site compatible with devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. An administrator can upload encoded H264 or Ogg videos and MediaCore will automatically select the best encoding for the device the user is browsing with. (It’s up to the admin to be aware of which video codecs and containers will work in which browsers/platforms.)
• Better Accessibility – The whole front-end in 0.8 is very accessible to users with visual disabilities. This includes support for adding closed captioning and audio descriptions to videos.
• Categories – We are now allowing categories to be nested.
• Search – Allows a user to search for videos and podcasts.
• Share – Allows a user to share a video with their friends via email, Twitter, or Facebook.
• Embed – Allows a user to embed any clip from MediaCore on their own site.
• Improved Comments – Integration with Akismet for anti-spam, and Gravatar for user profiles.
• Related videos – If you view a video, it will also pull up related videos.
• Featured videos – A special category that will allow an administrator to feature video content.
• Filter Video – Adds the ability for a user who is browsing videos to filter video by popularity, date, and whether it was featured.
• Over 100 minor bug fixes and UI enhancements.

Administrative Control Panel Enhancements

• Tiered categorization – Allows the administrator to tier categories. You can have subcategories and sub-subcategories.
• Improved add file mechanism – Allows for easier adding and removing of video/audio from the administrative back-end. This also adds support for HTML5 video.
• Add Closed Captioning / Audio Descriptions – Allows for an administrator to associate an XML closed captioning file, or an mp3/m4a audio description to any video.
• File deletion – When an administrator deletes a file from the back-end, it will now automatically remove the file from the server.
• Multiple flash players – Ability to choose which flash player you want to use (JWPlayer or FlowPlayer).
• Revised settings interface – We’ve cleaned up the settings interface and given administrators more power in customizing MediaCore to their specific needs.

Programming Enhancements

• Moving to Pylons – We have moved from TurboGears to Pylons as the web framework we built on top of. This minimizes the number of packages required for installation and makes the code easier to follow, for developers.
• Easier Installation – Most of the dependency issues people have been facing are fixed, as MediaCore now depends on fewer other packages and is more strictly aware of which versions to install.
• Model cleanup – We’ve really cleaned up the models, making everything a little more simple and straightforward.

Front-End Internationalization

• Although we are not ready for internationalization quite yet, this release is a step in the right direction. We’ve removed many of the image-based buttons so that it will be easier to translate MediaCore into other languages. Once we launch version 0.8 final we will start looking for people to help us with internationalization. Our hope is to have French and German translations ready for the next release (version 0.9).
• If you are interested in helping us with this please contact us at info@simplestation.com.