Pipeline servers on hiatus

The Pipeline instances hosted on Georgia Tech servers are currently on hiatus while the team focuses on other projects. The source code will continue to be available at our Github repository and users are welcome to download and set up new instances on their own web servers. However, the Pipeline instances hosted on our servers will not be maintained or updated during this hiatus.

Pipeline at the University of Minnesota, Jan. 26

Amy Bruckman, an associate professor at Georgia Tech and member of the Pipeline team, will be talking about Pipeline at the University of Minnesota on January 26. The title of her talk is, "Online Collaboration: Creative and Civic." She will be discussing academic research looking at online collaboration, including Newgrounds collabs and several Pipeline projects, such as Holiday Flood and Game Jam 6.

The event is free and will take place in the Walter Library from 4pm to 6pm CT. Click here to register or get more details.

Hope those of you in the area can make it!

Changelog for January 5

A new year and some new improvements for Pipeline!

* Files tab - From your feedback we learned that many users didn't realize Pipeline offers powerful tools for file management. To make this more obvious, we added a Files tab, which lists all the files uploaded in a project. Every upload has a "preview" and "download" link, along with pertinent info like file size, who uploaded it, and where it was uploaded. (If no files have been uploaded yet, the tab explains how.)

* Banning/untrusting yourself - Trusted users can no longer untrust or ban themselves. This was a silly bug that we overlooked, but no longer!

* Username in header - Per user requests, you'll now see your username in the header when you're logged in.

* File links - We fixed a bug where the names of uploaded files were broken links.

Pipeline success stories

In the past few months Pipeline has been used for all kinds of projects: videos, games, artworks, class projects, and more. As 2011 comes to a close, we wanted to highlight a couple of recent Pipeline success stories. Here's to many more in 2012!

Holiday Flood - 20+ artists from around the world used Pipeline to organize a month-long, collaborative art project which originated in the Newgrounds Art Forum. For each of the 12 days of Christmas, two artists submitted one artwork each based on the day's theme to the Newgrounds Art Portal, for a total of 24 artworks. In addition, each artwork contained a puzzle piece that, when combined, revealed a holiday poster and greeting, complete with every artist's signature. The project was submitted to the Newgrounds Flash Portal as an interactive art gallery with original music, where it received excellent reviews and an award for being one of the top-rated submissions on Christmas Day 2011.

Here are the finished products: Flash Portal submission and Art Portal submissions

And here's the Pipeline project that produced them: Holiday Flood on Pipeline

Game Jam 6 - Every month or two, Newgrounds sponsors a Game Jam, a competition in which teams of artists, programmers, and musicians try to create a Flash game in just a few days. For Game Jam 6, announced in the Newgrounds Collaboration Forum in early December 2011, the theme was "hallucinations" and the deadline was 96 hours. Fifteen teams, each consisting of four randomly-assigned members from around the world, used Pipeline to help organize their game projects. Of those, nine submitted completed games to the Newgrounds Flash Portal by the deadline. All of the teams that used Pipeline and submitted a game received better ratings than the teams that didn't use Pipeline. Additionally, the three top-rated games all used Pipeline. We awarded $100 prizes (partially donated by Newgrounds) to each of these teams, listed below:

• 1st place: Love's Cadence by Team Kafka
• 2nd place: Trippin Kitchen by Team Heidegger
• 3rd place: Devilish Differences by Team Nietzsche

All of the Game Jam 6 submissions can be viewed in this Newgrounds collection.

Congrats to these folks and Happy New Year!

Changelog for December 10

We're pleased to bring you one of the biggest Pipeline updates ever! Feedback has been pouring in from the recent Game Jam contest on Newgrounds.com, plus other great ongoing projects. We have been working night and day to respond to your bug reports and feature requests. Here's our latest:

Bigger stuff:

* Remember login for 30 days - Pipeline now uses cookies instead of sessions for logging in, so you'll only have to log in every 30 days if you choose.

* Better project privacy - if your project is set to "private", only members and people you invite will be able to see it. Previously anyone with a private project's URL could see it.

* Better image previews - now if you preview a large image, Pipeline will automatically resize it so the preview doesn't take over your browser window.

* Better Flash previews - Pipeline now uses SWFObject rather than Flowplayer to load Flash (swf) files, so previewing these kinds of uploads should be faster and more reliable.

Smaller stuff:

* Better upload thumbnails - you'll now see a full thumbnail instead of a sliver when you upload images, video, or Flash, and the thumbnail will be proportional.

* Truncated upload filenames - if you upload a file with a really long filename, Pipeline will truncate it so it doesn't break the page layout.

* Show upload date/time - Pipeline now shows the date/time each file was uploaded.

* Pagination for discussions - longer discussions are now broken down into pages with 10 replies each, rather than one long page that was clumsy to navigate.

* Admin improvements - various minor improvements for using Pipeline in admin mode.

Enjoy these changes and as always, drop us a line with your thoughts.

Changelog for November 28

The Pipeline team is still in a tryptophan-induced Thanksgiving haze, but we nevertheless have some flashy new features and bug fixes to report.


* New Activity tab - The new tab shows the details of each event, not just the summary, similar to a Facebook feed. It also shows the complete history for a project, not just last 50 events. (Use the page links at bottom of the tab to navigate). We also got rid of the sparkline and discussions on that tab, to make things simpler.

* Activity since last login - Pipeline will now highlight events that have happened since your last login. Older events will look faded. This works on all pages, not just the Activity tab. Note: this feature will only start working after your next login (feel free to logout to get it started).

* User-customizable themes - Pipeline comes with two color schemes, a light theme and a dark theme. Users can pick the theme they like best and save the preference to their profiles. Just go to the Settings page (link in top right corner) and scroll down to the Theme panel.

* Better support for private projects - user profiles will now show private projects the user has joined and their activity within private projects if the viewer is also a member of those projects. Previously Pipeline hid all private project info from user profiles, regardless of who was viewing them.

* Upload new file types - You can now use Pipeline to share Photoshop files (.psd), Word documents (.doc), and PDFs.

Pipeline source code released

Big news! Pipeline's source code has been released! Pipeline is now freely available through Github under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This means, in part, that:

you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things. 

Releasing the source code under this license expands the possibilities of who can use Pipeline and encourages experimentation and innovation. Here are a few practical implications:

* You can set up a Pipeline on your own web server, if you have one. This will be especially appealing to organizations who want to set up an internal Pipeline that's not visible to the outside world. Note that you can still ask us to set up a Pipeline on our web servers -- just email us a request.

* You can make changes to the Pipeline source code, if you're a programmer. Maybe you need to make changes to use Pipeline for a new purpose we haven't even thought of, or you have ideas for improving Pipeline and don't want to wait for us. We're excited to see what you come up with!

* You can use code from Pipeline in another project. Pipeline has many components, including file management, user management, email notifications, and media encoding, so parts of it could be useful for a wide range of other projects.

To download the source code, go to our Pipeline project on Github and click the Downloads tab. Then click either "Download as .zip" or "Download as tar.gz", whichever you prefer. Your download should start immediately.

Installation instructions are included in the README.txt file. Pipeline requires Apache HTTP Server, PHP 5, and MySQL.

Good luck and let us know how it goes!