Development Updates

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. 

As Release 2.0 is nearing, the Avalon team has been working to include a few new features as well as refining the player. Upgrading to Hydra head 6.0 fixed a number of bugs that kept on popping up. The developers continued to work on incorporating features into the collection/unit workflow and now collections can be deleted and units can be browsed. We were able to do some testing and bug fixing on the mediaelement.js player which looks good and behaves in a more predictable manner. Avalon is maturing before our very eyes!

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!

Release 1.0 of the Avalon Media System is now available for evaluation and pilot. The release includes the following features:

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. 

VM images, content and licensing, oh my! The release candidate is just about ready to be shared with everyone. Final tweaks and testing are happening! If you want to see the stories that we are working on each sprint, check out the current sprint page on our wiki.

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