November 2018 Status Update

Submitted by falcon on Wed, 11/07/2018 - 13:27

This November release is a fundamental release for two reasons. The new content repurposing feature not only allow authors to be a lot more productive using the existing content types. It also allows H5P programmers and designers to build bigger content types where authors may reuse their existing content in interesting new ways. The H5P Core Team will be launching some new big content types that makes good use of the content repurposing (copy/paste) very soon!

The new metadata system takes us one step closer to the H5P Content Hub, our upcoming global content repository for sharing content between H5P users. Not only does the new metadata system enable us to handle licensing better, we can and will also expand the system to handle more metadata including tags, level and discipline.

Busy days ahead for the H5P Core Team

We spent a couple of extra months on this release - leading to a huge pile up of deadlines and obligations, especially now in November. Community members who self-host and report issues or ask for support may notice that we’re not as quick to reply and help as we usually are. We hope to be above water again after the H5P Conference in the beginning of December.

Next release: The H5P Conference 2018 release

The next release will probably be our biggest release ever. We’ve been working on it for over a year and are very excited about presenting new content types and features at the H5P Conference 2018 in Melbourne from December 3rd to December 5th. 

What we’re releasing will be a surprise for the participants, and there will be at least one release per day. If you want to be among the first to experience these new features there are around 20 tickets left for the conference. I hope to see you there!

H5P.org content creation will soon be moved to H5P.com

H5P.com, the SaaS version of H5P, is ready to handle the millions of requests H5P.org is currently struggling with, and H5P.com will handle it with ease. H5P.com will give those who try out H5P a much better first impression as it is designed as a service for creating and managing H5P content and can handle an enormous amount of traffic. The current test-drive feature on H5P.org is just a quick-fix we did four years ago. We’ve created a short note comparing H5P.com with the current H5P.org test drive feature.

We hope that in November/December we will have automated sign-up and payment on H5P.com. This will empower users new to H5P to experience content creation on H5P.com, a more stable and featureful environment then H5P.org. We will at this time disable or at least limit content creation on H5P.org and/or embedding from H5P.org for new content to reduce confusion and steer more users towards a better experience on H5P.com.

H5P.com is a paid service and we’re still contemplating what to do with those currently using H5P.org to create real content for ideal causes and are unable to pay for a subscription and unable to self-host. They were never supposed to use H5P.org for hosting real content in the first place, but we have obviously not communicated this clearly enough. The content is doing a lot of good and we’ll try to find a solution where H5P can continue to help good causes for organizations unable to finance their own hosting. We will most likely let users apply for being allowed to continue using H5P.org or use H5P.com to create and edit content for ideal purposes. (yes, a western school is doing a lot of good with their content too and usually isn't swimming in money - but still, they should be able to make a small contribution towards H5P development and pay for their own hosting and support, so if we do create a process for applying for free hosting most western schools using H5P for their own purposes will not be accepted :)

Just to be clear - we’re not about to remove content already created on H5P.org. It will be staying, but it won't be possible to edit or create new content. You can edit the content by moving it to a self-hosted site or to H5P.com. We will make moving from .org to .com extra easy.

We will also do more to reward and incentivise those that support the development of H5P financially by signing up for H5P.com. We will be adding the following exclusive improvements to H5P.com going forward:

  • Premium themes with configurable colors that provide an H5P experience far superior to anything you’ve ever seen before. It will be a complete redesign of H5P. We're demoing the first prototypes to a couple of H5P.com customers today.
  • Premium reporting based on xAPI allowing teachers to assess their students and allowing authors to assess their content
  • Some premium authoring features allowing authors to be more efficient and more creative like autosave

The above H5P.com premium features are picked to make sure that there is an even stronger incentive and reward for organizations to use H5P.com and thus fund the future of H5P. The existing H5P content types themselves will of course not get any H5P.com exclusive features and remain free and open source making sure that the H5P content remain portable between all H5P compliant websites and keeping us in line with our vision. To be honest I would have wished that we didn't need to add any premium features to H5P.com, but after pretending to be a sales person for the last three months it seems to me that the vast majority expects to get access to some premium features when they sign up.

We're signing up more and more customers on H5P.com and these customers will very soon be sponsoring the majority of the development of H5P. H5P.com was kind of the biggest sponsor of this November release as well. We hope to see a rapid increase in our development speed in 2019 powered by H5P.com customers. The customers are also eagerly contributing feedback to the project and especially within xAPI/reporting we'll see large steps forward soon based on this feedback. Most of the current H5P.com customers are large enterprises, universities and large schools or school districts. These customers help ensure that we continue to do the right things going forward both for H5P.com customers and self-hosters.

What to do next?