Press Release
Maestro
Joined: 14 Feb 2005
Posts: 838
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 Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2006 12:48 am Post subject: Creative Commons releases Open Source software CcHost 2.0 |
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ccHost, an Open Source project that provides web-based infrastructure to support collaboration, sharing, and storage of multi-media using Creative Commons licenses and metadata, released version 2.0. This major feature release combines approximately six months of development, usage, and testing into packages that anyone may download, install, and use to build on-line media sharing communities.
These features most notably show up and are tested in Creative Commons' project, ccMixter (http://www.ccmixter.org), a popular on-line music social network service that supports legal media sharing and remixing. ccHost is the Open Source Software engine powering ccMixter. Anyone may download, install, and use ccHost to freely build media sharing communities.
Perhaps the largest features in this release are to aid feedback between community members. First, the addition of native reviews no longer relies upon phpBB. This drastically makes installation of ccHost easier for average users while integrating the previously separate review system into ccHost. Also, now all users have to do to rate submissions is to hover over the star ratings for a media file, and select how many stars. Then, rather than requiring a refresh of the browser, the ratings automatically update.
Other user enhancements include optional text formatting for descriptions, bread crumb path display for easier site navigation, not safe for work (NSFW) flagging, and a "How I Did It" browser. Also, for audio-based installations there is support for M3U-based radio. While previous versions of ccHost had RSS support, ccHost 2.0 now supports the ATOM feed standard and caching for all feed types. Beyond these, the most major under-the-hood enhancement to the codebase is in general performance enhancements which provide noticeable improvement in all areas of the site, most notably on user profile pages.
On the administrative side, ccHost now ships with the sample pool API turned on (http://ccmixter.org/media/viewfile/pool_api_doc.xml). Basically, this allows for multiple different ccHost installations to query each other for samples. Beyond the basic usage of multiple ccHost installations communicating through this RESTful API, anyone may also use the simple sample pool API to write code that interacts with a ccHost installation's sample pool.
Other administrative additions include import and export of settings, internationalization accessible through a string editor, replacement of magpie with custom code, a new ratings panel, stricter fairness policies, and various administrative options for administrators to customize ccHost. The monthly archives, statistics, and charts pages barely made it into this release, and require more testing and usage, yet are already solidly functioning on ccmixter.org.
The ccHost development community encourages new developers to contribute to the project. While ccHost already supports major audio formats such as MP3, MIDI, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, it also supports video and still image formats. Future development needs more contributors to add more media (file-type) functionality to ccHost as well as help with internationalization (i18n) support for multiple languages. Adding language support does not require coding experience since one may use the administrative string editor to add localization to a ccHost installation.
Find out more at:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CcHost
This is a press release |
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