Development
Last week, I promised to show you some of the work on moderation tools, but I won't be able to do that today. I had to take a break from working on this feature because I was not implementing it properly. I'll start working on it again in january.
However, this does not mean I cannot show you anything fancy! One interesting feature landed this week, which is support for embedding Funkwhale content into third party websites. From now on, when you share a link to an artist, album or track page on an external website that supports the OpenGraph protocol (which a lot of platforms such as Mastodon, Facebook, Slack, etc. support), a preview card with an image and additional data will be displayed.
You can also embed a Funkwhale player directly on your own website using the new embedding tool, as shown in the gif below. You can embed full albums or individual tracks.
Implementing this has been technically challenging because of the way Funkwhale works. You should definitely read the technical notes on this feature if you're interested in the details!
Later this week, I've been focusing on improving the performance of the web UI, which takes a loooooong time to load, especially on slow connections. There is of course no single bullet way to fix that, but thanks to a lot of small, targeted improvements, the web UI will now load faster, load less data, and be more responsive during the initial load (we're talking about a factor 2 or 3).
This has been deployed on Open.audio yesterday and I expect this work to introduce some bugs, please report anything unusual with the web UI!
0.18 release
The last big missing feature of the 0.18 release is the moderation tools, and I plan to have a first, working set of tools in the first half of January. There are a lot of other tickets in this milestone, but I'm going to reschedule some of them and only leave important bugfixes that need to be done.
I'm pretty confident we can have a release available by the end of January! As always, though it's an estimate and may be subject to change ;)
Project management
You may remember I published a forum topic to discuss the potential setup of a non-profit around the project. I did not receive any feedback on this, and I really need some :D If you have a few minutes to jump in and tell me what you think of it, that would be great!
We'll discuss this at the next Funkwhale Sync anyway, and this is a quick reminder that you join us.
The slot is not fixed yet, but it's likely to happen on January 6th based on the first answers to the poll.
Personal
I'll be on vacations until January 2nd, and even if I'll be around, don't expect much progress.
I wish you nice holidays, see you next year!