Blog post week 2020-011: new shiny stuff, status update, and our first NLNet payment!

What has happened since last time?

First of all we skipped a week but hey, this happens :p

Regarding podcasts

Things are still progressing. In particular, @mjourdan contributed several missing wireframes for some import screens of the UI.

As of today, it's also possible to subscribe to 3rd-party podcasts directly from Funkwhale!

What remains?

  • Completing some of the federation features/tests
  • Designing/implementing the subscriptions UI
  • Designing/implementing the new album and track pages
  • Some additional testing and polishing

Most of the hard work is already done though!

Other dev news

Several interesting contributions were merged over the past three weeks, in particular:

Where are we regarding the 0.21 release?

It's been already 5 months since our last release. You may remember we initially commited to quarterly releases, so you deserve an explantion and status update.

Here is our initial roadmap for the 0.21 release:

  1. Podcasts/easier audio publication on the platform (in progress)
  2. Redesign of the sidebar navigation (completed)
  3. Screening for sign-ups (not started)
  4. Enforce mail verification during signups (in progress)
  5. Federated reports (completed)

As you can see, two out of five items are completed, and two more are in progress. However, we underestimated the work that was needed to implement the podcasts/channels feature. Although we're reaching the end of it, it took us several months to get here.

Item #4 should take a few days of work, and item #3 a week at most. Our current estimation for the podcasting feature is something around 2 weeks of work left. Add to that all the necessary small bugfixes and tweaks, 1 week.

If those estimations are accurate, and nothing unexpected comes up, you can expect a release by the end of April.

Some people in the community are concerned about the lack of releases, and we totally understand this. We'll do our best to honor our quarterly release schedule after Funkwhale 0.21 is out!

And if you want to see our current progress, you can always visit https://dev.funkwhale.audio/funkwhale/funkwhale/-/milestones/21 ;)

We got our first NLNet payment!

It's not a surprise, and we had no reason not to trust NLNet, but that's an important milestone for our us anyway! We completed several items from our roadmap, and got the corresponding payments from NLNet.

In case you're wondering, we have a public forum thread to follow the payments requests, and the associated roadmap items.

That's pretty much it for today. Thank you for reading, and see you in two weeks!

By @Funkwhale in Announcement