Sprint

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!

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. 

This week, the Avalon team spent a lot of time thinking about how to create collections without calling them collections! The team was able to almost complete backend modeling and testing; user interface will be the focus for the next sprint. Work was also completed on the crosswalk from the MODS fields that will be included in Avalon to MARC.  

We have a few team members up in Canada for Open Repositories 2013, so if you have any questions or want a quick demo just look for Jon Dunn, Claire Stewart or Adam Hallett!

After last week's venture into exploring administrative units, this week the team focused on how collections can be employed by Avalon.  Administrative units can now create and manage collections of items. This will be an easy way for collection managers to add content to a specific collection, and our metadata specialists spent a lot of time thinking of how those relationships would be captured in each MODS record. We are also happy to report that both IU and NU's pilot systems are up and running! 

This week the team worked on adding new functionality to Avalon. We introduced the concept of units to Avalon Media System. The term "unit" refers to an Administrative Unit, which can be made up of many collections and items. We also added some snazzy auto complete features to select unit managers. Besides units, more investigation of the mediaelement.js player occurred during this sprint. IU and NU spent some time getting their pilot systems set up. We're just about ready to see what Avalon 1.0 can really do! 

After releasing Avalon 1.0, the team spent some time cleaning up our code and investigating some future changes to Avalon, including looking at alternative player options and other ways to handle group management. If you have any feedback about what functionality you want to see in future releases, please join us at next week's webinar!

This week the team refined the various methods to download or try out Avalon Media System and cleaned up the documentation. We have our demo server up and running with Avalon and enough content to make it interesting!  

Click here to watch the full recording of this week's demo.