The server has been updated – this release includes a redesigned navigation system, changes to the Autofix (a.k.a. Guess Case) tool and Album Editor. Track durations can now be edited and a number of smaller bugs have been fixed.
A big thanks goes out to g0llum, lukz, matt and djce for making this release a reality. Now that we have this pesky re-org release out of the way, we hope to bring you several more releases before the end of the year.
Web Site Changes
Top Navigation
The top and left menus have been redesigned and rearranged, and now make better use of Javascript (if your browser provides it – they also work just fine without). You can expand and collapse the left hand menu if you’re short of screen space, or would just rather not see it all the time. Overall the new menus result in a reduced “page weight”, and should make it easier to find the pages you need.
Moved Files
Many pages have been moved around to different URLs. You shouldn’t necessarily notice any of the changes, as (apart from the navigation redesign, see above) all of the links are in the same places that they were before. However if you see that we’ve broken any links, please let us know. Thanks!
Home and Blog Archive Pages
The Home and the Blog archive pages (per-category listings of the blog entries) has been given a minor facelift.
Album language/script/date support upon insertion
The album submission process now supports adding language, script and release dates before inserting the album.
New Features
Identically-Named Artists in Various Artists Add Album
The Various Artists Add Album process was adapted to support duplicate named artists. Previously, the first matching Artist was selected from the database. Artists which yield a non-duplicate 100% match do not need to be selected, but if an artist needs to be specified, a list of the matching artists is displayed and lets you choose the proper one.
Album “Edit All”
You can now edit the track names of multiple-artists albums with the Album Editor. (If you have to change the track artists as well, you’ll still have to use the “Change” link in the album listing).
Track Time Editing
You can now edit the track lengths of manually added albums, which are currently displayed as `?:??`.
Release Dates in Add Album process
This feature was requested by many users for quite some time. Finally, the Releasedate editor is part of the Add Album process now.
New Client-Side Features (Javascript Required)
Relationships Instrument/Vocal Attributes Dropdown search
Because of the every growing list of instrument names in the AdvancedRelationShips add/edit interface, we’ve added a javascript function which enables users to search for instrument names in a intuitive manner rather than browsing through the dropdown list. Read the popup (e.g. Help link) on the interface for more details.
Autofix Box: Per-Field Autofix Options
Because it was often not possible to easily reach the buttons in the autofix box once the page had scrolled, there is now an option which displays the most important autofix functions near whichever input field currently has the keyboard focus. This setting can be enabled/disabled in the “Util functions” section of the autofix box.
Autofix Box: Input Field Resizer
A new Javascript function has been introduced which enables the default size of the edit fields to be overridden. There are three links available: “make smaller”, makes the text input fields narrower; “make bigger”, which does the opposite; and “fit text”, which tries to make the fields just big enough (although how successful this last option is can depend greatly on your specific browser). This should make editing classical albums much easier.
Autofix Box: Search and Replace
This is a new function which allows replacing certain elements in the currently focused input field (the blue input box) and/or all fields of the current form. It supports case-sensitive replacing and regular expressions. The buttons (remove parentheses, remove square brackets) have been replaced with presets which do exactly the same, but with the improvement that it can now work on all edit fields at once. This is a new feature; please tell us if you encounter any problems, or if you have additional suggestions for (currently hard-wired) presets. This should be user-definable one day.
Autofix Box: Track Name Parser
The new Track Parser allows track listings to be copied and pasted from some other page, so that they can then automatically be parsed into an album name, artist names, and track names. The album name and track name fields of the form are then filled in, and if you are editing a Various Artists album, the artist names are filled in too. Finally if track times (of the form ”3:05”) are encountered, the track time fields are populated too.
Autofix Box: Open/Close State
Usually the Autofix box remembers its open / closed state across pages (so if you open it on one page, it will remain open on all subsequent pages until you close it). Now there’s an extra preference where you can instead choose to always have the box start off open, or if you prefer, closed.
Moderation Notes
The moderation note box on the edit forms was too small for lengthy comments. The box now adapts to the amount of text typed into the text area.
Autofix Test Suite
The guess case / autofix test suite has been added to the main server. This is essentially the same set of tools used by server hackers to test the guess case script when adding new features or fixing bugs. The Guess Case Sandbox allows you to inspect the application trace, if any unexpected behaviour occurs. If you are interested, you might like to try to run the test cases, to see if your browser supports all the fancy-ness that makes up the guess case script π
Closed bugs
The following bugs have been closed since the last release:
- 1324286 no artist checking with Add Album
- 1180482 General RDF bugs
- 1218401 “born” date displayed as “begin” date on track lookup page
- 1247993 Tracks with no capital letters report
- 1239431 Move Disc ID: Failed dependency
- 1281393 trackrel incomplete
- 1275841 incomplete URIs in albumrel RDF
- 1281390 RDF: Result to mq:GetCDInfo contains mq:status twice
- 1281392 artistrel/albumrel/trackrel don’t contain mq:status
- 1171148 MBE_AlbumGetNumTracks returns too many tracks
- 1281409 report TRMsWithManyTracks
- 1281083 typo in Database Stats page
- 1321506 Case insensitive moderator search
- 1074524 Mozilla renders site in Quirks mode when Doctype incomplete
- 1261129 TEST.mb.org VA cd adding bug
- 1281207 Add Album allows for wrong # of tracks
- 1238015 Guess Case: Apostrophe causes wrong caps
- 1305808 Add “compiled” relationship
- 1313322 munged “Recording Engineered by”
- 1281979 remove trm id mod voted down
- 1232370 AR: no link to external URL’s
- 1044690 Different times in Album page & TOC page
- 1213607 batch operations sometimes generate VA mod even for 1 artist
- 1089712 Add TRM mod attributed to Various Artists
- 1170749 TRM WebSearch results page marks hit only by bgcolor
- 956249 No track lengths re-association when moving discid
- 918064 Batch mod checkboxes broken on Safari
- 750727 MAC artist changes aren’t highlighted
- 1054846 Artist searches with single result have redundant screen
- 1213033 show album mods doesn’t show Edit Album Attributes/Language
- 1033597 merging albums doesn’t merge attributes
- 946659 Track numbers can be set on albums with disc id
- 826167 [non-album tracks] is a *really* bad name
- 1213737 Only link editors can see link summary pages
- 1175334 DiscId can be added to [non-album tracks] album
- 1084015 Don’t accept albums with no tracks
- 1152414 Track number boundary
- 1026781 can’t leave password field blank
- 1185549 Removing non-leaf link type throws DB error
- 1200003 AR: Remove Link moderation (sometimes) causes Internal Error
- 1191038 Cannot re-enable auto-moderator privileges
- 1100279 [AR] linking two items with same name confusing
- 1180603 Underlined text should only be used for links
- 1182607 “Remove TRM ID” moderation is not verifyable
- 1186256 Adding artist – track relationship takes me to wrong page
- 1207200 Guess Case: “am/Am” becomes “AM”
- 775157 Guess-case has trouble with ‘(7" Mix)’
- 1114982 still getting data track
- 1194667 Misnamed edit types
MetaBrainz Blog 
I like the new navbar. Now we have a very good overview and can navigate much faster thru the site. =)
Thumbs up!
With all the new and improved, cool and exciting, toys and widgets this will be quite a ‘Lame’ comment. Then again you guys don’t need anymore of a
ego boost cuz I’m sure lots will be posted here later,
so tough ;).
Question/Comment is regarding the sidebar category: MusicBrainz Sites, its option of MusicBrainz & subitems – Master Server οΏ½ Find a Mirror.
Something just doesn’t seem right about it.. Why the default expanded list? The top 2 url to musicbrainz.org, the same as the Page Header (guess useful for text only?) but otherwise shouldn’t
MusicBrainz & Master Server be summed up in 1 being 1 in the same? (url wise, anyway)
..and ok a little ego boost… IT’S ABOUT DAMN TIME!! Hee Hee π
Regards!
P.S. Why doesn’t ‘Preview’ actually give you a ‘Real’ preview of what your post will look like?
Love the nav changes. It always took me ages to find stuff before. Now it’s much easier π
The new behaviour of menu that pops up every time you mouse over the menu item conflicts with tabbed browsing in Mozilla (and probably Opera and IE7). Each time you move mouse to switch to other tab and thus mouse over the menu to reach the top of page causes the popup to appear and then disappear again as you continued cursor move to click the browser tab. It would be great if next version will have the preference which will allow select between mouseOver or mouseClick to activate the menu.
yup, that was suggested before. it’s already in CVS π
Awesome job. Looks great!!
Yes, the nav bar looks great.