Software

This week was all about refinement. We started work on refining a new skin for the MediaElement.js player so that the player has nice sizable buttons that are optimized for both desktop and touch browsers. We refined and finished testing our migration tools and documentation for the various installation methods, so if you installed Avalon 1.0 you should be only six steps away from using Avalon 2.0!  We also started on one of our big priority stories for Avalon 3.0, which is to skip the transcoding step for media that has already been processed.

Please join us for an upcoming webinar for the Avalon Media System Project.

With Avalon 2.0 ready for public consumption, the team spent this sprint working on documenting our migration paths for the different installation methods. Our last two sprints have been devoted to setting up the distribution of our releases so we talked quite a bit about how to streamline the process so we can hit our releases more efficiently.  The team looked into our new media player, MediaElement.js, some more to figure out how to contribute new features and bug fixes. We have a plan!  

As we mentioned in a recent post, we are having a meeting this week in Bloomington with most of the formal partners and advisors on the IMLS National Leadership Grant that is helping to support development of the Avalon Media System, to discuss development priorities and future directions.

Who is at code release for Avalon 2.0?  We are! During our demo, the team decided that we had reached code release, which will allow the team to focus on updating methods for everyone to test out Avalon 2.0.  Bugs have been squashed, labeling has been updated and improved, and documentation is being written. A few of our bugs were fixed and pushed upstream to the Hydra Project--we are very pleased to contribute back to the community!

Next week the Avalon team will be hosting our second Avalon Media System Partners Meeting in Bloomington, Indiana. Several team members are busy finalizing the meeting schedule and dealing with logistics, while others are finishing release 2.0 of the software--and others still are working on both. It's a busy yet exciting time!

As we planned the meeting, we thought of those burning questions that we are always seeking feedback on:

Avalon 2.0 is much closer to seeing the light of day. We have a tried and true method for allowing migration of fixtures and people from 1.0 to the shiny new release 2.0.  Collection information used to be saved as a string but now Avalon 2.0 has a collection model allowing anything from 1.0 to be migrated to 2.0 with just one command!

Our punch list includes: final round of testing, some improvements to the interface, more documentation (is there ever enough?) and updating our installation methods. Fingers crossed that you will be seeing Avalon 2.0 very soon!

This sprint the team focused figuring out a method for migrating the content and roles/permissions from release 1.0 to release 2.0.  The team also spent quite a bit of energy on identifying bugs and fixing them.  Although we are not yet at code release we are much closer!

Watch the full recording of this week's demo.

Avalon version 2.0 has officially hit a feature freeze!

• The software now has an "About" page that can be used to show the health of the various components. You can see what version you are running of all of the components to. 

• Blurry, black thumbnails in your results are a thing of the past.  Thumbnails and poster images can be set before publishing each image. Batch uploading also allows for the offset to be set for the thumbnail and poster image too.