Hi everyone 👋
June has been a hot and busy month here at Funkwhale HQ. Despite the summer heat, we've remained hard at work 💪
Let's dig into some of the things we've been working on!
Admin documentation rewrite
This month we completed the first draft of our admin documentation rewrite. Admin documentation is an important area for a self-hosted project. It helps new administrators install, configure, and manage their Funkwhale pod. Our existing documentation was in need of some tender loving care after a few years of service.
The new documentation features a much simpler, task-oriented structure and up-to-date information. We've added more information about features like our management script and environment file. We've also made it simpler to navigate instructions by install method and platform.
If you want to check out the rewrite and give us some feedback, check out our forum post on the topic. Once we've got this merged, we'll move on to our contribution guides and developer docs 📝
New contribution guides
Speaking of contribution, we've been discussing contribute.funkwhale.audio for a little while. Agate created this tool as a way for newcomers to find ways to help on based on available time and area of interest. While it's a neat idea, it doesn't see much use and many people aren't aware of its existence.
The tool is a full web app, which means it requires constant maintenance and hosting. Since it's not seeing much use, we are exploring an alternative way of helping people get started.
We have a contributors section in our documentation. This section contains useful information to help developers get involved with the project. But Funkwhale isn't only for developers! We want to work with the community in many areas such as design, communication, and advocacy.
With this in mind, we're going to expand our contributor guides to cover more areas. These will include onboarding information, links to issue lists for newcomers, and more! Once we've done this, we will look at deprecating the old contribute tool.
If you have suggestions for the guides or want to voice support for the tool, check out our forum post.
Gitpod support
We always try to make contributing to Funkwhale easier. Thanks to wvffle, getting started with Funkwhale development is now easier than ever. You can now develop Funkwhale using Gitpod, a remote development solution. This tool connects to a Funkwhale development environment and editor in your browser. You can also connect it to a Visual Studio Code installation on your machine. This means you don't have to worry about cloning a repository to your machine 🎉
We're hoping that this tool helps to lower the barrier for new contributors. Check out our documentation for more information.
Ongoing development
We're continuing our march towards Funkwhale 1.3.0. As part of this, we've opened up discussions about how to expand the Funkwhale API. Since we have frozen Funkwhale API, we aren't going to make any major changes to the current version. Instead, we're looking into creating a new major version which will coexist with v1. A new API version gives us plenty of room to improve on the Funkwhale API and add some cool new features. It's early days yet, but we'll share more information as we go!
We're also working on another patch release, 1.2.6. We'll give you the full rundown when it's released, but it includes a few nice quality of life improvements. Some highlights include:
- Improvements to our scrobbling logic
- Better keyboard control on the login page
- A fix for managing playlists over Subsonic
That's it for now! Stay funky 🐳