Melody: Community Powered Publishing

In case you missed it: Melody 1.0.2 is out!

2011-08-02T22:28:52Z

In case you missed it, Melody 1.0.2 has been released and is a recommended upgrade for all users as it contains important security enhancements and fixes to its file upload system. We also took the liberty of fixing a number of bugs through out the system, including fixes to Melody’s theme management system, to its theme and plugin configuration system (a.k.a. “Config Assistant”), to its Theme Exporting capability, to its default theme DepoClean, as well as a smattering of miscellaneous fixes throughout. Melody 1.0.2 is the last planned release before Melody 1.1 due out later this year. For a complete list of all changes and fixes we have made since Melody 1.0, please consult the complete release notes for Melody 1.0.1 and Melody 1.0.2.

CMS Critic, Melody 1.1 and a new UI?

2011-06-16T23:03:24Z

Things have been quiet on the Melody blog, but not in the community. Development of Melody 1.1 is in full swing and here a number of features being actively developed:

The modularization of Melody’s code base continues as we continue our efforts to break its monstrous code base into more manageable components. In the future this will allow to more rapidly iterate on improvements we want to make, and allow users to dramatically reduce the size of their installation be eliminating components they do not need or use.
The project to eliminate the highly proprietary javascript framework called TypeCore, and replace it with jQuery is underway. We are a release or two from completely severing the tie, but it good to see work started.
The Atom Publishing Protocol implementation has been upgraded to be more standard compliant and has been tested to work with the popular blogging client Mars Edit.
We continue to back port popular features from MT5 into Melody, like the awesome listing framework developed by Six Apart. We have even made and shared back improvements to their implementation by overhauling the system’s javascript.
We have dramatically enhanced dashboard widget management and made numerous other improvements to the UI’s polish.

And in the news:

CMS Critic recently published an interview with myself about the current state and future of Melody.
Endevver recently gave a sneak peak of a new user interface for Melody it has been incubating.

Disclaimer: Byrne, the author of this post, is a Principal at Endevver.

Melody's Development History

2011-04-25T12:55:48Z

Curious about the history of Melody and how it got its start? Look elsewhere! (About and the FAQ, in particular.) This is a fun visualization of the evolution of Melody’s code!

I recently stumbled upon Gource, which will create a video that animates your repository’s commit history. It will draw a fun look at code where directories represent branches and files represent leaves, and users dance around creating commits.

With Gource and the Melody repository I was able to see just how much has changed over the past few years. Remember, Melody is a fork of Movable Type, and the commit history reflects it: this video starts at the end of 2008 with Movable Type 4.1. March 12, 2009, is when Melody forked, with a blast of new commits! The video ends just prior to our 1.0 announcement.

(I’ve tried uploading this several times now, and for some reason the first few seconds of it always get mangled!)

Check out Screenshots of Melody 1.0

2011-04-20T16:39:35Z

Want to learn more about Melody? Wondering what makes Melody different? Curious to see what it looks like? Check out our recently uploaded screenshots and feature highlights!

Say Hello to Melody 1.0

2011-04-19T18:04:17Z

It is with great pleasure, relief and pride that we announce Melody 1.0 is finally ready and available for download. When you choose to power your web site with Melody, you can rest easier at night knowing that your web site, no matter its size, is powered by one of the most proven, secure and scalable publishing platforms on the planet. If you are a Movable Type 4 user, then Melody 1.0 is the upgrade you have been waiting for. It is cholk full of new features, like:

Re-tooled and slimmed down the code base to reduce bloat and increase performance.
Revision histories for entries, pages and templates.
Redesigned Manage Entries screen supporting inline publishing and more detailed view of each entry/page.
Added a Design console for applying and managing themes.
Full fidelity theme exporting.
Full screen editor mode for entries and templates.
Improved documentation managed entirely by the community
New default theme: DePo.Clean by Derek Powazek.
User experience improvements abound!

Melody is not just for Movable Type users though. It is for everyone.

One area of the product we have paid special attention to is in theme creation and management. And as some indication that we are on the right track, Melody’s new theming framework has already led to creation of a number of new themes for the platform. Designers for the platform have all noted how much easier it is to build a web site, even when compared to other platforms. They like the fact that they are not required to know or understand the complex syntax of a programming language; they appreciate that they don’t need to learn Perl or PHP; they like that the templating language is intuitive, quick to learn and easy to read; and impressed with how much can be accomplished just by editing a theme’s configuration file.

Our most notable achievement however has been in providing a new home for the Movable Type open source community who, for years have been waiting for a platform they can more easily control, and a community that is more transparent and open to new ideas. Melody 1.0 is the first culmination of that vision for a better product and ecosystem — incorporating features, bug fixes and contributions to our documentation from an ever-growing list of individuals.

It has been a long road to get where we are today, longer than any of us honestly wanted or anticipated. If there is a silver lining it is in knowing that the extra time we took has given the software the time it needs to really stablize, and for us to feel supremely confident in recommending to people that Melody can power the largest web sites out there. A number of members of the community have even gone so far to run Movable Type’s Commercial and Community packs on top of Melody, and in all their testing, we have yet to see a single problem.

And with that, Melody 1.0 is now ready for the World.

Finally, as we take this moment to savor this important milestone we have all worked so hard on, we are excited to see that development on Melody 1.1 and beyond has already begun in earnest demonstrating that the future for Melody and Movable Type users is bright.

Come and get Release Candidate 2!

2011-03-23T23:52:41Z

Today, the Melody community released what we hope to be the last release candidate and final build of Melody 1.0. With this build now available to download, we hope to enter into a “burn in” phase where we closely monitor what issues users report to us in the next 5-10 days to determine if another build is warranted. Hopefully, the issues reported will not be critical, in which case, we will re-christen RC2 as Melody 1.0 and celebrate. So while we keep our fingers crossed, you can help by downloading RC2, installing it, and making sure everything works as you might expect. If they don’t, let us know so that we can help you resolve it and evaluate whether or not we need one more build. Hopefully though that won’t be the case, as people experiences so far have been very positive!

Encouraging non-technical contributors

2011-03-23T23:51:06Z

Gina Trapani, the lead developer behind the open source Social Media Analytics and Management application ThinkUp, just published an excellent article about how essential team and community diversity is to a project’s, and especially an open source project’s success. The article is a must read for anyone involved in managing an open source community and very validating to those of us working on Melody because it summarizes our own values and beliefs so well:

For programmers, the process of contributing to an open source project goes like this: you download the source code, you change the source code, and then you submit your changes to the project maintainers in the form of a patch, and if that patch gets accepted, your contribution shows up in the software. Done.

What’s not clear is how people who don’t code contribute their skills and expertise to making OSS software. Because it’s not clear, they don’t, and the software looks and feels like it was designed by engineers, for engineers—because it was.

At ThinkUp, there was a time that I was so focused on perfecting the right git branching strategy, I forgot that contribution does not always equal code. This is an area where we can still improve, because there are so many different ways non-coders can and should contribute to the project.

Gina goes on to list the many ways in which non-coders can contribute to ThinkUp, a list every open source project should publish to their web site, just as we do. We even make it a cornerstone of our homepage so that it is as obvious to first time visitors on how to contribute as it is actually download the software.

Gina points out that “sometimes turning a non-coder into a contributor is as easy as pointing them to a wiki page and asking them to add text about their experience using or troubleshooting the software.” And sometimes, that is true. But not often. The truth is that getting non-coders to contribute requires leaders within a community to constantly remind and reiterate to community members in specific and concrete ways how they can help.

For example, lets look at documentation. Documentation is without a doubt the single most valuable asset to a project, second only to the software itself. One cannot exist without the other. But documentation, like code, is just as daunting to a newcomer because it is never apparent where and how to start contributing. In fact, contributing to documentation is often more difficult because while software often has a database listing all the bugs that need to be fixed, documentation rarely has such a resource at its disposal.

That is why project leaders should be as familiar with their documentation as they are with the code. That way leaders can opportunistically, and routinely engage community members to contribute in very specific ways. This sometimes means not doing something you could easily do yourself, and taking on the more difficult task of reaching out to the community to do it for you.

You see, there are people in your community who want to help. They just don’t know how. What they are waiting for is not just an invitation, and a welcome mat, but the identification of something specific they can do, something they will feel confident in doing, and something they know will be valued. So the next time you find yourself in need of say, a feature comparison chart for your project, make it your first instinct to turn to your community for help. Be specific in what you ask for, and then, be prepared to lead the members of your community to the next logical step, and keep leading until your community is successful.

On the modern web, where far-flung strangers collaborate on things like authoring an encyclopedia and overthrowing abusive governments, it’s still too hard for most people to contribute to open source projects. It’s ironic, too, because open source collaboration was happening on the internet way before tools like Facebook, wikis, Twitter, and Google Docs existed. It’s not for lack of tools, it’s because of broken culture. Miliano writes:

Open source platforms are a community in the traditional sense of something you pretty much have to be internally motivated to join. Joining an open source community is closer to joining a church or moving into a neighborhood, and, let’s be honest, these neighborhoods are sexist boy’s clubs with no facility for mentoring, no respect for design, and mailing lists that are 50% dick-measuring contests.

But that’s not the way it has to be. If OSS projects do what it takes to welcome contributors of all stripes, not just the usual suspects, they’ll produce better software. At least, that’s our bet.

Its our bet too and it should be yours.

Release Candidate 1 is now available!

2011-03-02T23:54:10Z

We are excited to announce that Melody 1.0’s first release candidate it ready for download and use by the general community and outside world. A number of us have been using Melody for quite sometime with nary a hiccup, and this latest build is without a doubt the most stable build of Melody, and arguably Movable Type 4 to date. It has lots of bug fixes and even some minor features here and there, all of which are well documented in our release notes.

There are two things I want to say right off the bat about this release. The first is “thank you.” Thank you to the growing number of contributors we have, and to all the testers submitting bug reports and helping us to make the product better and more stable. Thanks specifically to the following people:

Thank you to Tim Appnel, a person who works behind the scenes to make sure our team of volunteers is on task and focused on the release at hand.
Thank you to Jay Allen, our Code Guardian who single handedly has been managing the merging of the many contributions we have been receiving, and who maintains and enforces such high standards when it comes to code and contribution quality.
A huge thank you to Mike Thomsen who has quickly become one of Melody’s leading contributors to the project. His name is one I think all of the core committers have been familiar with from the Movable Type community, but he has really stepped up his level of engagement with Melody, and for that we are all eternally grateful.

No release would have been possible without the efforts of these people.

The second thing I would like to say with all humility is that I am sorry. Two of the values Melody espouses is one of transparency and consistency, and I do not personally feel we have been fulfilling our obligation to those values. Therefore, not only do we need to work harder to improve our release processes, automated test frameworks and all of the infrastructure necessary to bring releases of Melody more quickly and more reliably to the community at large, but we also need to improve our communications about releases so that everyone in the community knows what to expect and when.

Thanks to everyone waiting patiently for a release of Melody 1.0, we do not have far to go before we have a full fledged release ready for production use. In the mean time, download your copy of Melody 1.0 RC1 today!

A Secret Weapon in Code Quality

2011-03-02T19:26:13Z

Author, Perl guru, advocate and sage, chromatic writes in a recent post to his Modern Perl blog, The Secret Weapon:

…quality is important. Code you can deploy today is valuable for today, but if you can’t maintain and modify and deploy a new version next week, it’s less valuable than code that you can maintain and modify and deploy again and again and again.

He continues:

A good team with good programmers and good discipline and the freedom and flexibility to refactor and revise the design of the project to make the current version sufficiently easy to maintain and modify while allowing future expansion is in a great position to continue to deliver business value.

chromatic is wise.

I’ve held for quite some time that, in the rush to get things out the door, this very vital adjunct is overlooked by developers. While chromatic’s post is about Perl and why he uses it, the necessity of code quality applies to any programming language and software.

This topic is particularly relevant to Melody today though. The challenges we experience today working with and evolving the software are testament to the importance of code quality to its long-term viability.

For Melody’s predecessor, Movable Type, code quality was not sufficiently balanced with shipping — at best it was an afterthought. Having to wrangle this code on a daily basis I’d say it wasn’t even close. To me, allowing this was rather shortsighted because eventually it will catch up to you as I believe it did with MT.

Code quality is not directly apparent as new features or an improved UI, there is a perceived effect to end users. I understand as a commercial software company where these more tangible concerns would be a priority and major focus. Trying to market code refactoring and maintainability would fall flat. That doesn’t mean its not a concern though. I’m confident that every user is interested in the long-term business value of the software and can perceive the benefits of a low occurrence of bugs, rapid and timely releases and a wide range of plugin options.

Quality is a matter of balance between the short-term (features) and long-term (maintainability and expansion) concerns. MT suffered because that balance was heavily skewed and the ship eventually listed hard. Through that legacy, the Melody community now has its work cut out for us.

Melody 1.0's last beta.

2011-01-26T13:42:32Z

When I started this blog post I began as I normally do: go to our release notes to see what cool new features were developed, pick what I consider the most interesting ones, and then begin the process of writing them up them to get the community excited and pumped about the release. But the release notes for Melody 1.0 Beta 3 reveal something far more exciting than most fancy new features, and something that the community has already begun to learn on its own: we are finally converging on a stable release candidate.

So it is with great pleasure that we announce the release of Melody 1.0 Beta 3, the last beta before we release RC1 next week, and hopefully 1.0 shortly thereafter. So to all Melody beta testers: time to fire up your test instances and take one last opportunity to bang on Melody before it finally ships. And to the rest of the Melody and Movable Type community - get ready, 1.0 is right around the corner!

Download Melody 1.0 Beta 3 (build32)

The thinking behind Melody's logo

2011-01-04T17:40:56Z

Jesse Gardner, the designer behind this web site and Melody’s beautiful logo, has at long last added the work he has done for this community to his portfolio. He includes a nice write up about the Melody logo:

I began with a flower because it was feminine, approachable and simple—something that Movable Type wasn’t known for. The colors are meant to represent the variety of uses for (and users of) Melody—the six petals are a fun nod to Six Apart. The white burst in the middle represent seeds (as in seeds of an idea) or users (who would be coming up with those ideas).

Melody 1.0 Beta 2 now available

2010-11-23T23:09:36Z

After a short delay, we are happy to announce that Melody 1.0 beta 2 is finally available for download. This is an exciting release, not just because Melody is now more stable than ever before, but because we have made some exciting new enhancements as well. You can see full details in the release notes but here are some of my favorite highlights:

New User Interface. A small issue existed which prevented a number of Melody users from seeing Melody’s new UI. If you are running Melody today for example and you see a Movable Type logo in the upper right hand corner, then you will definitely want to check out Beta 2, because the UI might not be new, but it will be new to you!
Classic Blog Theme Pack. Melody now comes with two bundled themes: DePo Clean and Movable Type’s classic blog theme. In Beta 2 however we have converted Movable Type’s “default templates” into a theme, which will provide designers and developers and excellent reference implementation when building their own themes.
Redesigned Manage Entries and Pages screen. We have made some revisions to the layout of the Manage Entries screen to make it more useful and users more productive when using it.
Quick Look for entries and pages. Work with a lot of pages or entries? Need to take a quick peak of one to remind yourself what it is about? Now you can with the Quick Look feature found next to each entry in the Manage Entries screen.
Fast republishing of entries and pages. Now from the Manage Entries screen, you can republish individual entries with a click of the button, without ever leaving the screen.

This release has over 200 bug fixes, enhancements and changes contributed by numerous members of the community many of whom contributed for the first time

And don’t forget, we are only planning one more beta, so now is the time to download Melody and begin trying it out. If you encounter any problems we have folks standing by ready to help.

Upgrading to Melody from Movable Type

2010-11-04T16:38:21Z

We have heard from a number of users that they are getting lost when trying to upgrade from Movable Type (or early Melody Alpha builds) to the Melody 1.0 beta. They are encountered errors and other enigmatic issues. What I wanted to do was explain a little bit about why these errors exist, how to address them, and what we are doing to make this process easier for people.

Why are there errors when upgrading from Movable Type?

With every release of Movable Type, the Movable Type development team confronted opportunities to make simple changes it would like to make to the application, and how it is organized and packaged; and in almost all of these circumstances the team ultimately decided to forego making them in the interest of backwards compatibility. The Melody team however felt that the release of Melody gave us a unique opportunity to start with a clean slate and to finally commit to making those changes. These changes, like changing the name of the main config file, are highly disruptive and need to be addressed carefully.

Furthermore, because we gave ourselves permission to treat Melody as a clean slate, and to disregard just this once backwards compatibility issues, we decided to re-organize the plugins that are shipped with the core distribution. Now all plugins that are bundled with Melody are placed in the addons folder, leaving the plugins folder to contain only those plugins installed directly by the user. With this change users may need to delete certain plugins from the plugins folder so that they won’t conflict with their Melody counterparts.

The changes above we feel will benefit the entire Melody community in the long term, but if you are not aware of these changes, then your upgrade experience will be marred by error after error, which is obviously a very poor experience. The good news is that all these issues are avoidable if you follow a few simple procedures before you upgrade.
How can I avoid or fix these upgrade errors?

We have assembled some documentation to help users upgrade from Movable Type. These instructions detail specifically all the changes you need to make to Movable Type prior to upgrading to Melody, and every Movable Type user needs to read this documentation before proceeding.
What are we doing to make this easier on users?

Finally, while we know users will appreciate some helpful documentation, we also realize that now many people will instinctively turn to documentation first. So we are currently working on making changes to the Melody upgrade wizard to detect when a user might be upgrading from Movable Type, and then to walk them through the process of making the necessary changes. Here is a screenshot of what we are working on (keeping in mind of course that this is very rough).

Screenshots of Melody

2010-11-03T04:04:41Z

Ok, mea culpa. We committed the cardinal sin of release blog posts: we neglected to include screenshots of our beloved Melody. So without further ado, see for yourself what Melody has in store…

Installation Wizard

Template Listing Screen

You may notice the publish button next to the index templates providing a one click way of republishing your templates.

DePo Clean Theme Options

DePo Clean is a new theme that comes bundled with Melody. At your disposal are tons of theme options making it easy for anyone to customize the theme in a number of different ways. Developers can easily add a wide array of theme options to their own themes without ever writing a line of Perl or any programming language.

Edit Entry

Preference Bundles

Theme developers can easily package together a set of configuration options and preferences for Melody and any of its many plugins. These preferences can be applied automatically, or users can select which preferences bundle makes the most sense for them. This paves the way for organizations and users to define their own moderation policies for blogs within their network and make the application of those policies a cinch.

Plugin Preferences

Melody sports a new plugin preferences area so that users do not have to drill quite so deep to make simple changes to their plugins’ configurations.

Blog Settings

Making configuration changes to your blog couldn’t be easier with Melody. Now you can change as many options as you want and save once.

Plugin Management

Melody has a new screen from which to view all of the plugins installed on your system, and provides an easy way of enabling and disabling them.

Resources

Melody makes it easy to see the template tags and other features that a plugin makes available through the API in a newly redesigned System Information screen and area.

Get Satisfied with Melody!

2010-11-03T03:48:51Z

One thing users of Melody will notice right away when visiting the Melody web site, or using the Melody application is that there is always a quick and easy way to send us feedback, submit an idea, get help or ask questions. To help us collect all of your invaluable feedback, we have embedded Get Satisfaction just about everywhere. So if you ever encounter an error in Melody, sending us a bug report is always just a click or two away. And all the feedback you send will go right to our team of volunteers in our Get Satisfaction community to help you.

Since some of you may prefer not to have this cluttering your interface, we have made it just as easy to remove the tab as it is to send feedback.

But please don’t remove it. That would make us sad. After all, without your feedback, how will we know what to work on next?!