So the MediaGoblin fundraiser is in its last week, and we're coming near our goal of funding one year of dedicated MediaGoblin development. We're hoping over the next year to hit a point of MediaGoblin for the masses... AKA MediaGoblin 1.0! But wait... what exactly is MediaGoblin 1.0?
To answer that, we need to go over two things: what we already have, and what we're going to have. Let's go over the first list first...
Features we have (and will continue to improve on before 1.0):
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Image, video, and audio publishing
MediaGoblin provides image, video, and audio publishing out of the box, making it a self-hostable and free replacement for services like Flickr, YouTube, and SoundCloud.
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Flexible storage system
MediaGoblin has a flexible storage system built in. It comes with a local file storage option as well as integration with OpenStack's "Swift" storage system, so you can offload hosting to something like Rackspace Cloudfiles or equivalent. You can even add entirely new storage mechanisms.
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Media types are extensible
Images, video, and audio are just the beginning. MediaGoblin was designed to be extensible for entirely new media types. For fun, you can use the AsciiArt example media type, or you could even build something entirely new. Want to support presentations or e-books? Or maybe you want to have 3d model support? MediaGoblin was designed from day 1 to be extensible to fit the needs of whatever types of files you want.
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Commenting
MediaGoblin supports basic, markdown-enabled commenting on media entries.
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GeoLocation / OpenStreetMap integration
Does your camera have a GPS? MediaGoblin can put your photos on a map, so you can see where they're taken.
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Galleries and collections
We show the usual galleries of a user's media, as well as special galleries for tagging, and we also support user-curated "collections" of media.
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"Attachments" (for media source files and etc)
If you have files that you used to make the final piece of media you're sharing and you want to share those also, MediaGoblin has an option to allow for that.
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Beginnings of a plugin system
We have the beginnings of a plugin system, with already a couple of useful plugins (flatpages, so people setting up terms of service or similar non-dynamic pages are easy to add).
Features that aren't developed yet but should be for 1.0:
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API (for desktop/mobile app integration and so on)
We have an API that is close to being completed, but isn't yet. This should allow external application authors to integrate directly with MediaGoblin instances in various ways. This will allow for mobile phone uploading of photos and videos, or direct-from-desktop uploading, or integration with other services.
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Federation
One major feature is the need to hook together separate MediaGoblin instances and provide a social experience that feels as clean as if it users were on the same site (similar to how users on different email servers can communicate to each other from different servers but it feels that things are on the same thing).
We intend to use the meta-standard OStatus to provide the following federated functionality:
- Ability to subscribe to other users across instances
- Favoriting across instances
- Cross-instance collections/galleries (think Flickr pool)
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Audio and video podcasting support
With podcasting support, MediaGoblin will enter a new area of usefulness as people are able to use it to broadcast shows to subscribers.
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Admin tools
MediaGoblin needs better tools for administrators to be stewards of their instances, both to promote things appropriately and clean out problematic content and administer users.
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More and improved plugins
We have plugin support already, but more plugins need to be built. These include:
- Comment spam prevention
- Moving some extensions into plugins (OpenStreetMap, etc)
- Limiting storage and upload space for various users
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Easier installs and improved documentation
MediaGoblin needs to be even easier to install and develop. We can improve this situation with better packaging and stronger documentation.
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New media types
In addition to the media types we have, new ones are on the way: 3d model support is close to being polished, and there may be other types added soon.
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More general polish
MediaGoblin is well working software, but there are a lot of rough edges that still need to be smoothed out to make the experience better for users, such as cleaner submission processes, various adjustments to theming, and so on. We will continue to add shine to MediaGoblin as we approach 1.0.
Wow. Tall order! But if you look at the first section and the second section both, you can see we've already accomplished a lot. We can do this... but we need your help to make it happen! MediaGoblin has a wonderful volunteer community, but it takes a lot to coordinate... the closer we can get to our full goal, the better we can do to get a full and uninterrupted year of MediaGoblin development and coordination. Help us make all our dreams come true... Support MediaGoblin!
