[Social-mediagoblin] Goals for our first Alpha release in fall

[Christopher Allan Webber]

Okay, huge braindump about first alpha release goals.

Here's what we have at the time of writing:
 - Rather good infrastructure
   - mongodb basic integration
   - a hopefully-extensible storage interface (though we only have
     basic files supported yet)
   - a good custom "unframework" that matches our needs very well,
     very Django-like
 - You can register
 - You can submit an image and that works, but barely, and it's boring
 - Good docs
 - Some project public facing & communication stuff like docs,
   website, bugtracker

Here are goals for the September / October public alpha.  General
overview:
 - Be able to upload and display images (just images for the alpha,
   and this mostly already works)
 - Have a really slick theme (Jef van Schendel is making this look
   very likely!)
 - User galleries
 - Individual media pages
 - RSS / Atom feeds you can subscribe to
 - Translation infrastructure
 - Commenting (threaded??)
 - Database migration tools
 - Creative Commons licensing ability
 - Decent homepage including "featured" photos/artwork
 - A way to check conversions: ones that are in progress, ones that
   fail, etc (currently images convert fast so not a huge deal, but no
   way to check on things that might take longer like video
 - Password recovery
 - RDFa markup
 - Some way of culling spammers?  An audio/visual captcha? :(
 - A hosted example on http://mediagobl.in (with heavy warnings that
   things are likely to simply break, don't use this for your
   permanent stuff yet)

Things I would love to see happen but doubt we'll get done by then,
but useful to think of as near-future things:
 - A watch-list of other users you want to follow (think a statusnet
   timeline, but for media)
 - starting work on OStatus integration (presumably simply
   PubSubHubbub support to start with)
 - Slicker, in-place AJAXy uploading
 - An API

Here's some example of URLs as I expect them to exist and what I think you'd 
see on them.
 - http://mediagobl.in/ -- homepage of this GNU MediaGoblin install,
   shows a few featured images, info on GNU MediaGoblin, how to join, etc
 - http://mediagobl.in/~cwebber/ -- shows my "profile", including some
   info about me, a few of my latest images, some of my favorites
 - http://mediagobl.in/~cwebber/m/a-walk-in-the-park/ -- see my "Walk in the 
Park" media entry
 - http://mediagobl.in/~cwebber/gallery/ has a longer list of all my stuff
 - http://mediagobl.in/~cwebber/gallery/?page=2 to get to page 2 of my gallery, 
etc
 - http://mediagobl.in/~cwebber/feed/ RSS / Atom feed to subscribe to

PS, if you haven't seen Jef van Schendel's mockups for
http://mediagoblin.org you really ought to see them now:
 - http://schendje.fedorapeople.org/goblin/homepageTestComic.png
 - http://schendje.fedorapeople.org/goblin/docsTestComic.png

Lastly, here's an ascii art mockup of the main page for your amusement.
http://dustycloud.org/gfx/goodies/mediagoblin_frontpage_mockup.txt

We have some contributors onboard helping us now, and this is great, and
we also have a lot of people who have wanted to help contribute but
haven't been able to until this point because I haven't gotten things
written up well enough for people to start contributing :)

See:
http://bugs.foocorp.net/projects/mediagoblin/issues

If something is not yet a bug but is listed above and you want to work
on it, mention to paroneayea or willkg on IRC; we'll try to make a
proper bug ASAP and get you on the hackers list so you can contribute.

I'll be at Libre Graphics Meeting next week, so if I'm unresponsive,
talk to willkg for docs stuff, willkg or jwandborg for programming
stuff.  Ping schendje about graphics stuff if he's around, or otherwise
write about graphics contributions to the list, probably.  You can also
email me privately at any time. :)

I'm excited about the amount of response we've gotten
already... we're going to need a lot of help to make this dream come
true, so if you're thinking about getting involved and something on the
list above sounds appealing, your help will be appreciated!

-- 
𝓒𝓱𝓻𝓲𝓼𝓽𝓸𝓹𝓱𝓮𝓻 𝓐𝓵𝓵𝓪𝓷 𝓦𝓮𝓫𝓫𝓮𝓻