Blog post week 2019-40: Funkwhale 0.20 is here!

What has happened since last time?

Funkwhale 0.20

The release was published this morning and an upgrade of your pod is recommended if you want to benefit from the many, many improvements, bugfixes and new features!

Here are a few noteworthy changes, but as usual you can find the full list in our documentation.

Suport for associating genre/hashtags with artists, albums and tracks

Funkwhale will automatically extract genre information from uploaded files and associate it with the corresponding tracks in the form of tags (similar to Mastodon or Twitter hashtags).

Tags can also be associated with artists and albums, and updated after upload through the UI using the edit system released in Funkwhale 0.19. Tags are also fetched when retrieving content via federation.

Tags are used in various places to enhance user experience:

• Tags are listed on tracks, albums and artist profiles
• Each tag has a dedicated page were you can browse corresponding content and quickly start a radio
• The custom radio builder now supports using tags
• Subsonic apps that support genres - such as DSub or Ultrasonic - should display this information as well

Landing and about page redesign

We've completely redesigned the landing and about page, by making it more useful and adapted to your pod configuration.

Among other things, the landing page will now include:

• your pod name and an excerpt from your pod's description
• your pod banner image, if any
• your contact email, if any
• the login form
• the signup form (if registrations are open on your pod)
• some basic statistics about your pod

The landing page will still include some information about Funkwhale, but in a less intrusive and prominent way than before.

Additionally, the about page now includes:

• your pod name, description, rules and terms
• your pod banner image, if any
• your contact email, if any
• comprehensive statistics about your pod
• some info about your pod configuration, such as registration and federation status or the default upload quota for new users

New reporting feature to let people contact moderators

It is now possible to report content, such as artists, tracks or libraries, as well as user accounts. These reports are forwarded to the pod moderators, who can review it and delete reported content, block accounts or take any other action they deem necessary.

Support links

Users will now be reminded on a regular basis that they can help Funkwhale by donating or contributing. This notification can be turned off in the pod settings menu.

If specified by the pod admin, a separate and custom message will also be displayed in a similar way to provide instructions and links to support the pod.

Dark theme

Funkwhale now has a built-in dark theme that you can enable in the application footer.

Account deletion

Users can now delete their account themselves, without involving an administrator.

Allow-listing to restrict federation to trusted nodes

The Allow-Listing feature grants pod moderators and administrators greater control over federation by allowing you to create a pod-wide allow-list.

When allow-listing is enabled, your pod's users will only be able to interact with pods included in the allow-list.

Custom CSS

Admins can now specify custom CSS code to customize the look and feel of their pod, directly from their pod settings.

Catalan and Czech translations

These two new languages were included in the release, thanks to our translators <3

This brings the number of supported languages to 20. 6 languages are fully translated, and of the remaining 14, 3 are translated at 80% or more, and 7 at 50% or more.

If you want to help with translations, you can, and it's rather easy if you follow our instructions!

Easier install and upgrade

We've worked on a dedicated install script to reduce the friction while setting up a new Funkwhale pod.

If you've hesitated to set up a pod in the past, you may want to give it a try: it will give you a fully functional pod in minutes. Upgrades to future releases are also fully supported.

New documentation theme

We gave some special care to our documentation by switching to a new, more readable and modern theme.

It will also be easier for people to correct typos and suggest changes, as we now provide a direct link to the documentation source on GitLab!

Finalizing our roadmap for Funkwhale 0.21

Now that we're done with Funkwhale 0.20, we'll soon be starting to work on the 0.21 release, scheduled for early 2020.

We've started a discussion with the community to agree on a roadmap for this next release, and we're finalizing the discussion with a vote.

The current proposal is to focus the 0.21 release on audio publication, by bringing support for podcasts and channels in Funkwhale. The 0.22 release would be focused on stabilization, enhancements, bugfixes, and could possibly be labeled Funkwhale 1.0 ;)

The vote is still open for a couple of days, if you want to join!