Melody: Community Powered Publishing

First steps of a new way to manage plugins

2010-05-06T21:50:49Z

A couple of weeks ago I posted my thoughts on creating a new packaging format for Melody plugins and its advantages:

The biggest advantage to [this new packaging format] is to allow us to use github to automate plugin and theme installation and upgrades because now one could easily do this: (snip)

What I am snipping out of the above quote are some geeky command lines which illustrate how to checkout a project from git. Such command line snippets now seem anachronistic given that the community has taken a major step in implementing this vision through a new plugin which, after a little TLC, will find its way right into Melody.

What is most exciting I think is the path and roadmap this plugin squarely puts us on. From the plugin’s README:

This plugin is part of a larger effort to completely overhaul how plugins are discovered, installed and managed in Movable Type and Melody. The roadmap for this plugin is for it to interface directly with a centralized plugin directory managed by the community. In this capacity, the need to enter a git url at all will be completely obviated. Instead, users will search for the plugin they want from within Melody, and then click “install.” The directory will know the git URL so users don’t have to.

Let the testing begin

2010-04-21T17:09:24Z

Today begins our journey on a road leading to one of the most important milestones this community will ever reach: the first ever launch of a production ready version of Melody.

We have updated our download page with links to downloading the most recent version of Melody, and included what we think are simple instructions on how to get started. These instructions include where to download Melody, how to install it (for now we will still rely on Movable Type’s install instructions), and where to report bugs.

Since the very beginning of this project people, especially non-developers, have asked, “how do I help?” Well, good news, there is finally a way everyone can help: become a tester and join the elite group of people who will be heralded as the ones who helped make Melody possible!

Rethinking the Movable Type plugin packaging standard

2010-04-12T18:46:18Z

I originally posted this tome of an email to the openmelody mailing list, but figured there might be more people than just developers interested in what we have been working on and thinking about. Here we go…

~~~~

Things have appeared a little sleepy recently. I apologize for that. I have been working on some big stuff for Melody that I wanted to share.

1) Theme Manager - Endevver (disclaimer: I am a principal at Endevver) commissioned Dan Wolfgang to build for Melody a new Theme Management interface. We are working on the finishing details now and so far we really like what we see. At a high level this is an implementation of how TypePad manages templates in that it allows for two modes of operation:

a. Linked to Theme - in this mode, users are not allowed to edit templates. The look and feel of a site is derived exclusively from the theme source code. As changes are made to the theme, the site's templates are updated simultaneously.

b. Unlinked to Theme - the classic MT mode where the user is allowed and invited to edit their templates. In this mode as updates are made to the theme, they are not applied automatically to the theme. You must reapply the theme to see the updates, but at the risk of losing any changes you have made.

Theme Manager also comes with a theme dashboard showing a preview of your site, and other options to customize the look and feel of your site. Again, a lot of inspiration was drawn from TypePad which we think offers a great model for this.

We also allow designers to embed their PayPal email address to more easily prompt users of their themes to donate to the cause.

Static File Deployment - This is a biggee for end users. When implementing Theme Manager we wanted to look at the entire life cycle of theme management from installation to management. There Dan also implemented a framework by which themes can package their static files for MT to install for the end user automatically. We can’t underscore how big this will be. So big that I think we should revisit the plugin packaging standard for Melody.

NEW PROPOSED PLUGIN PACKAGING STANDARD

Right now plugins are encouraged to package themselves like so:

PluginName-1.0/plugins/PluginName/...
PluginName-1.0/mt-static/plugins/PluginName/...

This is straight forward, but one of the things that this structure makes difficult is to have a plugin be pulled directly from source control because the plugin is fragmented into two distinct groups of files. With the enhancements Dan made to Config Assistant (already core to Melody) static files would be packaged as follows:

$MT_HOME/plugins/PluginName/config.yaml
$MT_HOME/plugins/PluginName/static/*

Upon installation of the theme, MT would automatically copy files found in static/ to:

$MT_HOME/mt-static/support/plugins/PluginName/

And it would give you a template tag <$mt:PluginStaticWebPath plugin="PluginName"$> for you to access the web accessible endpoint where your files were installed - wherever that might be.

This would allow plugins packages like so:

PluginName-1.0/plugins/PluginName/config.yaml
PluginName-1.0/plugins/PluginName/lib/...
PluginName-1.0/mt-static/plugins/PluginName/...
PluginName-1.0/mt-static/plugins/PluginName/images/logo.png

To be packaged like so:

PluginName/config.yaml
PluginName/lib/...
PluginName/static/images/logo.png
PluginName/static/...

Again - the biggest advantage to this is to allow us to use github to automate plugin and theme installation and upgrades because now one could easily do this:

prompt> cd $MT_HOME/plugins/
prompt> git clone http://github.com/byrnereese/mt-plugin-assetgallery

Something that is impossible today due to limitation in git. For example, git does not allow me to clone or fetch a sub-directory within a repos. I can only pull down the repos in its entirety.

Anyway - enough typing. What do people think?

~~~~~

As a post-script to this would-be email, I will also add the following. One of the things I think would be wise is to begin requiring config.yaml files (of course I am not the first person to state definitively that this would be a good, no great idea). Once this file is required then we can defer to the config.yaml to define all the meta data one would need to not only run the plugin, but to also have it hosted in a self-maintaining plugin directory.

To this end, we turn to our brother blogging system WordPress for inspiration for something it has done an amazing job with: building out a rich ecosystem for supporting plugin developers. At the heart of this ecosystem is a plugin directory, and what it does uniquely well is maintaining itself. Movable Type’s plugin directory requires plugin authors to go back to the directory to update if they make any changes. WordPress’ on the other hand, is integrated seamlessly with a source code control system. To register a plugin, you just checkin your plugin’s files to a svn repos they provision for you. Then whenever you update your plugin, the directory is updated automatically for you. By integrating the directory with the developer’s workflow, they ensure that their directory is always up-to-date and minimize the overhead anyone has to spend maintaining it.

I would like to do the exact same thing for Melody.

Ok, now really I have done enough blabbering. Time to sign off the email-turn-blog-post.

git tip: auto-completion for local branches and remotes

2010-01-15T19:27:36Z

As you may or may not know, Melody uses git and we love it. We use it so much, we thought we should share a bash recipe with you that helps us work more efficiently on the command line. The following recipe, when added to your .bashrc file, will allow you to use the TAB key to auto-complete any git commands, local branches and local remotes. Hit TAB twice and it will show you a list of possible matches. Very helpful.

# This command line completion script will handily autocomplete
# any git commands as well as any remotes and branches you have
# defined.
#
# Add this to your .bashrc file
complete -f -W "$(echo `git branch | sed -e s/[\ \*]//g | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | uniq`; \                                                                       
    echo `git remote | sed -e s/[\ \*]//g | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | uniq`; \                                                                                   
    echo `git | tail -23 | head -21 | cut -d ' ' -f 4`);" git

Screencast: Unit Testing and Using Git With Melody

2010-01-14T08:21:10Z

Jay Allen and Byrne Reese explain unit testing in Melody and demonstrate how to use Git to make, commit and push changes to the code from your own local repository in this live screencast recorded Wednesday, January 13th.

Part 1:

Part 2:

What is PubSubHubbub and why make it core?

2010-01-12T17:33:58Z

Not too long ago the core development team upgraded and folded into the core distribution of Melody Tatsuhiko’s PubSubHubbub plugin to make it immediately available upon download and installation. If you are like most people, you are probably asking yourself, “umm, what in the world is ‘pubsubhubbub’ and who keeps letting geeks name important internet protocols?”

Luckily I don’t have to answer these questions directly. Instead, let me refer you to the technology’s creators, Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin, who explain very succinctly why this is cool, and admit to the obvious, “PubsubHubbub is a geeky name” (and we love you for it guys).

So why did we make this core? Easy:

Better SEO - Pubsubhubbub is not replacing feeds, they are augmenting them and helping you to plug your site into the services that want to consume your data - like search engines, feed readers and more.
We think this is the way servers will be handling blog subscriptions in the future, and putting this into Melody will give our users a head start on getting embedded with the technologies and services that matter.
Pubsubhubbub is more performant and scales better. Melody is all about operational integrity and we will aggressively adopt any technology that can dramatically improve the uptime of your web site.

Preparing for the big launch and getting trained on unit testing

2010-01-07T18:59:17Z

In our most recent community conference call, we began putting our ducks in a row for a launch of a Melody 1.0 beta. Our first line of business? Bring the product to a level of quality we feel necessary to support a community of beta testers. The best way for us to do that is to build out a robust set of unit tests that we can rely on to assure a baseline level of quality going forward.

The good news is that Movable Type has a massive number of unit tests. The bad news is that most of them fail. (cough… wheeeze) So our focus in the coming weeks will be systematically go through each unit test suite and get them all to pass. It is daunting task, but we know that by working together in a concerted way, we can easily tackle it. So we are doing two things:

First, we invite the community to join us for a day long hackathon on January 20th in which we work together in fixing as many unit tests as we can. The person who fixes the most will win a $100 Amazon Gift Certificate.

Second, to prepare for the event we will be holding an hour long training session the week before (January 13, 2010 at 10:00 PST) in which we will introduce people to the Melody development environment and methodology. Jay Allen, our Chief Code Ranger will present a brief overview on unit testing in Perl, git and making contributions to the product. Then we will all delight in watching Byrne stumble through the process himself. It promises to be a worthwhile learning experience for everyone who participates. RSVP now!

Melody Debugging and Unit Testing Training Seminar
Wednesday, Jan 13, 2010
10:00am PST

Listen to the podcast

From today's designer training seminar

2009-12-16T20:02:00Z

We had a wonderful turnout at today’s free training seminar for designers; and by “wonderful” I mean we were at capacity and actually had to turn away visitors because our Adobe Connect account couldn’t accomodate everyone. I must say that it is so rewarding for me and everyone working on this project to see a turn out like this and it reaffirms that the Melody project really is poised to be a huge contender in the content management and blog publishing space.

We are currently in the process of assembling a video and screencast of today’s seminar, so if you missed it, you can always wait to see it again later on in the week when that process is complete. In the meantime, here are the slides from today’s presentation:

Update: the audio component (provided separately) is now available.

We encourage you to share the presentation with your friends and the designers you may know.

At the end of the presentation we also invited attendees to ask us questions. Here are a few of the questions they asked (with answers of course):

Will Melody have a custom fields solution?

The answer is a resounding yes. It is not likely that the solution will be fully integrated into the core product by the time we ship Melody 1.0, but it will be available as an optional plugin to help facilitate its testing and development.

Will Melody have a redesigned administrative console or user interface?

It is certainly the core team’s desire to revamp the user interface to clearly differentiate it from its cousin, and to make much needed enhancements to certain key aspects of its user interface, but whether or not such a drastic change is ready in time for a 1.0 release depends upon the community’s willingness to design, test and support such a change. It is our suspicion that a redesign is not likely for Melody 1.0, but then again the community has surprised us before, so we will see.

Join us for a Free Online Seminar for Designers

2009-12-10T23:24:36Z

To help prepare users for the upcoming release of Melody, we will be taking time to educate as many of you as we can about how to make the most of Melody. Our initial training sessions will focus on designers and developers, and as we get closer to release will expand to include sessions for authors and content managers.

So if you are interested in learning more about Melody, about the many new features we are adding specifically for designers, and about just how easy is it to build web sites for your clients using Melody, then our first online seminar (I just can’t bring myself to use the word “webinar”) is for you. RSVP now!

About the Event:

In this online seminar attendees will be introduced to the Melody Content Management System, and then be taken through a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a web site using Melody. Then, at the end of the 45-minute presentation attendees will have an opportunity to ask the core members of the Melody design and development team specific questions they might have.

When all is said and done attendees will:

See just how easy it is to create, package and distribute a theme for Melody without having to know a programming language.
Be introduced to Melody’s semantic, simple, and honest-to-god easy to learn templating language.
Learn about the many features specifically designed for designers, like custom theme options and preferences bundles.
See some of the differences between Melody and Movable Type.
Have an opportunity to provide the core development team with your feedback to make Melody an even better platform for designers.

We use git and we love it!

2009-11-20T17:35:21Z

Jay recently posted this video to the openmelody mailing list. Jay is Melody’s Code Ranger and is responsible for wrangling all of the changes and contributions being made by the community. In addition to being a git expert, he is also our resident git evangelist and has donated a tremendous amount of his time to teaching us all how to use git in order to make our lives as developers easier. Everyone he has introduced git to has loved it, especially theme designers who have, until git, had no easy way to manage and collaborate upon building a web site with other designers and developers.

The video below caught my attention, not just because it provides a great technical background on git, but because it was given by Randall Schwartz — one of the most recognizable names in the Perl community because most of us learned Perl by reading his books.

Note: this talk is pretty technical, if you are looking for a video tutorial on git oriented more towards beginners, check out this one.

Melody 1.0 Development In Full Swing

2009-11-18T18:00:27Z

When Melody was first announced it was difficult for us as a team and community to answer the one question most people had: “what features are going to be in it?” That was a difficult primarily because Melody is what we like to call a “do-ocracy” in which the features and roadmap are driven first and foremost by those willing to step up and actually do the work to make it happen; and until we had a group of people actually doing something, we wouldn’t really know what features Melody 1.0 might have.

Well much has changed now that the community is growing and contributions are on the rise. We now have a lot of stuff getting actually getting done, and as a result Melody 1.0 is starting to take shape. So to finally answer the question so many people have had, here is the first overview of what we are currently anticipating to be in Melody 1.0:

Revision Histories - Revision Histories will allow administrators, designers and users to maintain a history of all the changes that have been made to pages, posts and templates. Users can view diffs, rollback to prior versions and more.
Full-screen Editor Mode - Melody’s template, entry and page editing screens will all feature the ability to expand the main text editing area to the full width of the page in order to give users the ability to edit their content more easily and with fewer distractions.
Real-time Web Support - Melody has the technology to deliver your blog posts in real time to a new breed of applications like Google Reader — all of the immediacy of something like Twitter, with none of the limitations presented by RSS.
Enhanced User Interface - A number of key screens in the application having to do with blog, plugin and web site configuration have been redesigned to be more efficient to use and navigate.
Russian Language Support - A Melody community member has contributed a Russian translation which we hope to bundle or make available upon release.
New Logging Framework - Melody’s replaces its proprietary logging system with a powerful, world-class, open source logging framework that is used the world round by countless professional web hosts and site operations team. One key advantage of the new system: the ability to be notified via email or IM of critical error messages that occur.
Enhanced Theme Configuration Options - Designers will rejoice in knowing that Melody significantly reduces the amount of technical knowledge anyone must have in order to build a robust, feature rich theme. Know HTML? Can you edit a config file? Then you can build world-class themes for Melody. No joke.
New, Social Media Ready Theme - Melody provides a major overhaul to the theme available to users right out of the box - with robust theme options to enable Twitter and Facebook integration with the click of a button, advanced AJAX threaded commenting, and more.
jQuery Support - Melody 1.0 will begin the process of phasing out all proprietary javascript libraries in favor of a much more widely used, adopted and documented framework: jQuery.
Web Framework Compatibility - Melody is taking the important step in deprecating a number of APIs and coding conventions whose presence has long hindered Movable Type’s support for web frameworks like Catalyst, mod_perl, mod_perlite and the new kid on the block: Plack.
Road to a Slimmer Core - Melody has an aggressive roadmap to remove old code that should be no longer in use to help make Melody faster and trimmer. To assist developers plan accordingly new warnings will be issued whenever deprecated template tags, or coding conventions are used.
Documentation - Yes, documentation is a feature, and so far more hours has been put into improving documentation than any other single feature being developed for Melody. When Melody 1.0 is released we will have completed a Melody Templating Language Primer, a Designers Guide to Melody, a Developers Guide to Melody, and a Melody Theme Reference Manual.

And that is just the beginning as more and more people are stepping up to help every week. Follow along with us on twitter (@openmelody) as we bring more and more features online, and subscribe to this blog to be the first to be notified when the Melody 1.0 beta begins!

Learning to hack on Melody in one hour

2009-09-11T18:55:34Z

Even though Melody is a fork of Movable Type, we wanted Melody in many respects to be a fresh start for the product and platform. In starting fresh we wanted to re-evaluate the entire contribution chain to make sure it was as frictionless as possible. Central to any open source project and the ease at which people can contribute is the source code control system. Now traditionally Movable Type has been managed using subversion and for the many advantages over its predecessor cvs, subversion this day and age seems anachronistic in that it architected around a highly centralized single repository.

Enter git.

Unlike svn, git is architected around the operating reality of most open source projects: that the work that goes into them is inherently decentralized. Architecting itself around this underlying assumption has many benefits:

developers are free and encouraged to fork projects to work on them independently.
developers can work on a project, and commit to them frequently, without fear or anxiety of disrupting the parent project.
developers can more easily “pull” and “push,” or in other words, selectively share code between forks and projects.

In addition, the hosted service github, where Melody’s code is hosted, adds numerous features on top of git which makes managing projects a snap:

Git’s “fork queue” shows a list of all the people who have forked the project and what changes they have contributed back to you. It even gives you some idea of how easy it will be to merge their changes in helping alleviate one of the greatest pains of project maintainers.

But most importantly:

Github is a social network for developers allowing users to follow and monitor what their friends are hacking on.

We wanted Melody’s focus to be on community and ease of contribution - and git and github seem perfectly suited to help us achieve those goals. However we have heard many of our users tell us that they are unfamiliar with git.

Thankfully, O’Reilly recorded an excellent one hour tutorial on git and github which will help anyone curious about git or contributing to Melody get started.

Open Melody Community Call #13

2009-07-17T21:07:57Z

For those of you who missed today’s call, it was a lively one that you might find very interesting if you care about how the Melody sausage is going to be made, particularly that spicy Melody 1.0 variety.

You can listen to the entire call below (or subscribe to the podcast), find out more details about the this call or about all past and future Open Melody conference calls

Next call: July 24th, 2009 at 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific

Open Melody Community Call #12

2009-07-11T23:36:15Z

Yesterday we held our weekly conference call. The agenda was something along these lines:

SXSW
Code Guardians
Blogging on/about Melody
Dogfood
Product Planning

You can listen to the entire call below (or subscribe to the podcast), find out more details about the this call or about all past and future Open Melody conference calls

Next call: July 17th, 2009 at 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific

Behind the Scenes Part 2: Choosing a Name

2009-07-11T20:48:54Z

From the very beginning “Melody” was one of our favorite name ideas, but it was not the only one. Finding a name that properly embodied the values and qualities of this project was very important to us. So we embarked on an extensive brainstorming process and vetted more than four hundred different names. What follows is a brief overview of the names that we liked, but that ultimately didn’t make the cut.

The Runner-Ups

Larkspur

Larkspur was one of the first name ideas to gain traction in our group. It was suggested by Mark Stosberg and got enough momentum even for Jesse to do some initial branding exploration.

Talkoot

Talkoot, which is a Scandanavian word which caught my attention because of its meaning. From wikipedia:

“Talkoot is a group of people gathering to work together, for instance, to build or repair something. The word is borrowed into Finland-Swedish as talko. It is the cultural equivalent of common work in a village community, although adopted to the conditions of Finland, where traditionally many families lived in isolated farms, often miles away from the nearest village. A talkoot is per definition voluntary, and the work is unpaid. The task of the talkoot may be something that is a common concern, i.e. for the good of the group, or it may be to help someone with a task that exceeds his or her own capacity. The institution bears considerable similarity to barn raising but is more general in application.”

In the end, I think the group just didn’t like the sound of the word, and didn’t want any name that seemed was so foreign that is seemed almost made up. I for one have grown tired of product names that sound like the name of a Star Wars character.

Janata

Many of the names we considered came from other languages. We looked for words that translated literally into one or more of the values we thought was essential to our identity, just as “Drupal” means “droplet” in Dutch. One of those words that resonated with us was “Janata” - a Hindi word meaning “the people” or also “community.”

Foundry

This was one of Tim Appnel’s ideas and his personal favorites. I think everyone liked the name, each for their own reasons, but in the end we thought it felt too technical. Movable Type and WordPress for example are names that feel mechanical in nature and very much disconnected from the people who make them work. We wanted something that would exist in contrast to that - something with a more organic quality.

Monarch

Everyone loved the imagery the butterfly brought to the table and we loved the idea of “metamorphosis.” I am not sure why we ventured away from this name, but it might have had something to do with trademark issues, or our feeling that it was a little too overused and cliche.

The Top 11

Yes, our list of favorite names went to eleven. This final list of names comprise the ones we all considered to be the strongest possibilities:

Melody

Larkspur

Texet

Harmonic

Janata

Hansa

Talkoot

Monarch

Ensemble

Twill

Ignite

Our Final Pick

No matter how many names we considered, the one that had virtually unanimous appeal was the name we used as the project’s code name from the very beginning: Melody. As many familiar with Movable Type will know, “Melody” was the original default username (“Nelson” was the default password) for Movable Type a long time ago. The name was chosen by Ben and Mena in reference to Serge Gainsbourg’s album “Histoire de Melody Nelson.” Aside from liking the name we all felt it was a fitting homage to the product Melody is derived from.

For those who are interested, you can also listen in on the group early on the process discussing our many name options in one of our weekly conference calls, which by the way, are always recorded and available for the public to listen to. Listen now: