mediacore-ce/release-notes-091plus

Release Notes for MediaCore CE 0.9.1+

New Features

MediaCore Administrators/Operators

YouTube Channel Import admin page

Ability to Import Complete YouTube Channels

In the admin settings interface you can now import complete YouTube channels. This feature was developed by Aaron McNeal (SimpleStation), Robert Buchholz and Felix Schwarz

Currently you need to specify the channel name (e.g. "LinuxMagazine") and not the YouTube channel URL (e.g.  http://www.youtube.com/user/LinuxMagazine). Please note that importing YouTube videos can take quite a long time (many minutes, depending on the channel size) and you might see timeouts if MediaCore CE is deployed using FastCGI or nginx/uwsgi.

Videos which are not available in your country can not be imported.

Patches to remove the current limitations are always welcome.


Python 2.4 Support restored:
MediaCore CE now supports Python 2.4 again. Support for 2.4 was accidentally broken in early 2011. Please note that you will see some SyntaxErrors during the installation ( issue 121) during the installation but these can be ignored safely.

Improved Video Embed Code compatibility:
Some third-party software like WordPress was confused by the self-closing <iframe /> tags in the video embed code. Even though technically this tag is perfectly fine by the HTML spec, we changed the embed code so it uses more "traditional" <iframe ...></iframe> tags.

Removed Necessity for a Local Mail Server (SMTP):
Previously MediaCore sent all notification emails (i.e. video upload/comments) to a SMTP server on "localhost". This is still the default however you can change by setting smtp_server and possibly smtp_username/smtp_password in your deployment.ini.

YouTube player settings

Better Configurability for the YouTube Player:
Robert Buchholz added several new configuration settings to the YouTube player:

  • show hide/annotations
  • autoplay
  • "modestbranding" (remove YouTube logo)
  • option to autohide only the progress bar (but leave the controls visible)

Custom Head Tags:
You can now add arbitrary tags to the HTML <head> section (e.g. to better integrate with third-party JavaScript like ad networks). Custom tags can be added in the Settings admin / Appearance.

Added Thumbnails for Default Media:
When you create a new MediaCore instance, you will get real thumbnails for the default media.

MediaCore Developers

JavaScript License Change to MIT:
The license for the front-end (public) JavaScript code is now licensed under the  MIT license. Previously MediaCore administrators were potentially unable to comply with the GPL if they used third-party JavaScript under a license which is not GPL-compliant (e.g. Google Analytics, Sublime Video player). To remove that uncertainty, all public JavaScript code created for the MediaCore project was relicensed. Please note that all the rest of MediaCore (e.g. Python code, JavaScript in the admin ui, markup) is still licensed under the GPLv3+. For more precise licensing information, please read the 'LICENSE.txt' file.

Support for non-compiled Players:
Each player in MediaCore has a corresponding Python class but also a JavaScript part which handles the user interaction with the player (i.e. switch between wide-screen/narrow-screen player). In previous versions the JavaScript code had to be part of mcore-compiled.js, a "compiled" JavaScript file (generated with the Google Closure Compiler). This made it impossible to ship a plugin with a player which required a specialized JavaScript manager because the original method names were replaced with basically random strings.

In this version MediaCore falls back to the original names if a JavaScript player does not have the "compiled" methods. A sample plugin will be published separately.

Please note that this mechanism is a "stable API". If you rely on this feature please test your plugin with future versions of MediaCore carefully before upgrading.

Bug fixes

  • Fix: Could not add YouTube videos which had no description
  • Prevent "duplicate content" rating by Google (bad sitemap.xml)
  • Could not disable 'sitemaps' and 'rss feed' at the same time in admin
  • Prevent exception if user agent does not specify an acceptable format for sitemap.xml/RSS feed. This prevented some bots from spidering the MediaCore sitemap.

Database changes

This version requires some database changes, please run "paster setup-app <ini file>" after you upgraded the source code.

  • version 54: Add a new settings key for "custom <head> tags"

Dependencies

No new/updated dependencies

Committers in this release:

Attachments