Avalon 7.7 Now Available

The Avalon Media System team is proud to announce a new release, Avalon 7.7, which includes significant changes to the media player and a wide variety of improvements and bug fixes.

Ramp, a media playback and presentation component library designed for use with IIIF Presentation 3 manifests, replaces the existing MediaElement.js-based player. Also developed by the Avalon team, Ramp's components are now responsible for rendering almost all aspects of the item and playlist pages, and Avalon's IIIF manifest generation has also been enhanced in turn.

Upgrading will require a full reindex of your Avalon instance due to performance improvements introduced in 7.7. This release also includes Solr 9 support, and we recommended upgrading your version of Solr to 9.x along with 7.7 if possible. See the Upgrading Avalon 7.6 to Avalon 7.7 page for upgrade instructions and notes.

Notable Changes and Updates

• Ramp replaces the previous media player and most presentational elements on the Playlist and Item pages
• Application speed has been greatly improved on the Playlist and Item pages
• Multiple caption files can now be associated per media file, with language value assigned for each caption file
• New "Add to Playlist" form provides greater flexibility when adding media to playlists
• "Series" added as a new descriptive metadata field and is also indexed for faceting
• Improvements to accessibility that bring user-facing Avalon pages up to WCAG 2 Level AA conformance
• Transcripts can be marked as "machine-generated" to appear differently in the UI
• Previous and Next buttons added to the media player for easier navigation between sections
• Added checkbox to set auto-scroll property for transcript viewer
• Structural Metadata Editor now displays video when available
• Searching in the Timeline listing has been changed to allow for friendlier, fuzzier matching
• Changes to collection admin page forms for updating access control
• A new administrative facet allows filtering by item access level
• Many updates and additions to IIIF manifest generation
• IIIF Authentication removed from publicly accessible items
• Support for reCaptcha v3
• Support for Solr 9
• A new system script has been added to improve reindexing from Fedora