Currently, when you install MediaGoblin, you'll get the standard front page which decribes what MediaGoblin is, with the whole "Hi there, media lover! MediaGoblin is..." bit (as you can see on http://omgmg.dyndns.org:6543/).

I'd like to propose a different kind of front page. Since MediaGoblin will be federated and all that, we'll have multiple instances running, which people can customize as they want. One of these could be a website for Pokemon images, while another one could be for Harry Potter fanart. These will have different uses, different audiences, different names and probably customized styles. The only thing they have in common is that they're powered by MediaGoblin.

So, I propose we kind of push the MediaGoblin "promotion" to the background. We've already got "Powered by MediaGoblin, etc" in the footer. I think we can remove the MediaGoblin logo in the top left, since these sites won't be MediaGoblin but just run by it. Then the front page could be used to explain what kind of website it is, and maybe mention that you can use your MediaGoblin account here.

Here's kind of what I have in mind. The top one is the current edition, obviously. :)

What do you guys think?

Users should be able to mark media entries as favorites by clicking a button/link in the entry detail view (and probably from gallery views as well). This change will likely require the creation of a new "UserFavorite" model with a structure like:

{'user': user_id, 'media_entry': media_entry_id, 'created': datetime.datetime.now()}

...and also a new field on MediaEntry containing a count of UserFavorites for that entry (to avoid expensive queries to generate this number dynamically for every request).

During registration, if you enter a password containing non-ASCII characters, GMG shows its general-purpose "Server Error" page, not helpful to the user.