Media UK v5 is coming

In February this year, I mentioned that Media UK was undergoing some work, and that development work on "v4" had ceased. In fact, we did some small maintenance releases, not least to ensure that our RadioPlayer work went ahead as planned.

I mentioned that v5 of Media UK is coming out in May, and I also promised to keep you up to speed with the changes.

It is May, and Media UK v5 should be ready by the end of this month.

Changes already coded are:
- A full article feed from selected journalists, so you get a good idea of what they write about.
- You'll use Facebook to log in to Media UK. No more forgotten passwords.
- Adding additional staff to media titles is streamlined and simplified.
- The site will also be more robust; malicious activity, as we saw yesterday, will do less harm.

In addition, Media UK will have a new look and feel: focusing on a neat and tidy view, and using some clever tricks to achieve it. A mobile view will follow.

Some of our code improvements won't make the first release of v5, but will follow shortly afterwards.

While our existing discussion area will disappear, we will continue to host forums, too; you'll need Facebook to take part, as we continue with the ethos behind our well-established real-names policy. This does mean that archived discussions will be removed, so if you refer back to some of these discussions, please let us know and we'll ensure that we retain them on the new site.

Feel free to comment, below, about these changes, and I'll try to answer any questions you have.