GSOC 2013

We are participating in GSOC 2013 (if we're accepted, that is!)

To both students and mentors, please read up on the GSOC 2013 help page!

How do I apply as a student?

Well, we need to be accepted as a mentoring org first :)

But then:

• Submit your application (details coming soon)
• Join us on IRC and on our mailing lists.
• Set up a development environment via our HackingHowto

It's important that you communicate... most MediaGoblin communication happens on IRC, so you should join us there and discuss (#mediagoblin on irc.freenode.net)!

Possible projects

Here are a list of projects that students may wish to apply for for GSOC 2013:

Blogging system

We've had an increasing number of people ask if MediaGoblin would be a useful blogging system. The answer is that at present, it isn't: even though we support an ascii art media type, media types aren't really the right way to handle blogging since they don't really fit with the "gallery" style of editing things in MediaGoblin.

But people are interested in something that's more along the lines of Tumblr: a blogging platform with good media embedding integration. In many ways, MediaGoblin is perfect for this!

Some thoughts:

• Blogs might go at /u/foo-user/b/ and individual blogposts at /u/foo-user/b/blogpost-slug/
• Blogging should be a plugin
• HTML with something like TinyMCE integration would be good. HTML would need to be cleaned on the backend.
• Maybe other types would be allowed (markdown, restructured text) though I'm not sure how much more complex that makes cleaning HTML output.
• What about commenting? Would we need a seaparate comments table?

Document / presentation system

There's some work toward a document type in MediaGoblin, but to get a *really nice* document type, it might take some work.

• Conversion from various documents to PDF via libreoffice on the backend
• On-page reading with pdf.js
• Preservation of original file, with ability to download
• Other things???

Possible mentors: Nathan Yergler, Aeva NTSC

Pluggable user authentication & implementations

We'd like a pluggable user authentication module. Some people want to use things like LDAP. Some people would also like BrowserID integration.

With our new work toward pluginification it would be good to see the structure for user authentication to be interface'ified. It would also be good to have implementation for several types of logins such as BrowserID, LDAP, and central authentication system stuff.

Possible mentors: Nathan Yergler, Joar Wandborg

Administrative interface / moderation tools

At present there isn't much as in terms of tooling to deal with things as an administrator. Several things would be greatly of help to admins at present:

• Views to search for users and take actions upon them
• Tools to deal with handling problematic content/users
• More generalized panel for looking at things being processed
• ???

Possible mentors: --Copiesofcopies (talk) 15:02, 1 April 2013 (EDT), Joar Wandborg

Processing panel improvements

While media is being uploaded, there's not very good and clear indications of this, though we have some basics.

• Show the number of entries that are currently in processing in the dropdown user panel at the top of mediagoblin instances
• In media entries that are currently in progress, give clearer information about amount of work left? (Note, showing percentages might be hard)
• Nicer looking demonstrations of what failed.

Note: this one might require a lot of graphic design and discussion; anyone interested in it would have to work closely with people on IRC before submitting a real proposal.

Possible mentors: --Copiesofcopies (talk) 15:03, 1 April 2013 (EDT), Joar Wandborg

Pluginifying media types

Media types currently have their own way of being configured separately. It would be good to be able to make them into bona-fide plugins (if anything with some special case metadata). This will also allow media types to define things like special-case views, etc.

Possible mentors: --Copiesofcopies (talk) 15:02, 1 April 2013 (EDT), Joar Wandborg

Possible mentors: Joar Wandborg

User upload account limits

It would be great to have the ability to set limits on the amount of stuff people can upload. This would involve both hooks to track the space of media as it's saved (maybe this should be fairly core?) as well as the ability to refuse an upload because a limit has been already hit. Tools to change limits would also be good, especially via an administrative interface and ./bin/gmg

--Joar (talk) 07:41, 30 March 2013 (EDT) mediagoblin.storage.StorageInterface should probably implement a get_size method or similar.

Possible mentors: Joar Wandborg

Search interface

We don't have any sort of search for media whatsoever at present. Obviously people want this!

There's been some discussion of a search interface that would be federated, but for the scope of this, we don't need to worry about that. It would be enough to investigate a search engine that would allow for searching across the subjects/titles/descriptions of media.

Possible mentors: Nathan Yergler, Aeva NTSC

Media type reprocessing framework

This one is tricky! Basically, allowing media to go back into processing... ie, resizing an image to a new size, re-transcoding video, etc.

Possible mentors: Joar Wandborg