Development Updates

During the 42nd sprint of the Avalon Media Project, the team made major progress on our 3.0 features... and then some! Our player and content is now embeddable even when the content is restricted. Avalon can now support permanent URLs (although at this point we have only configured it to work for Northwestern, which uses CNRI's Handle System).  We continued work on campus and course-based access control through learning tools interoperability (LTI).

Sprint planning on Friday the 13th. What could possibly go wrong? Well...nothing. It was a swell sprint planning session. The team closed out ALL of the stories plus some additional non-spooky bugs.

Remember the 15th of November, when the Avalon team completed over 50 points in a single sprint? This sprint finally got us moving towards new features for Avalon 3.0. A big priority is master file management; we were able to make some big strides in making sure the system can move, leave in place, or delete master files. Our next sprint will focus on making Avalon aware of where files and derivatives are being stored.  

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.

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!  

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.