A group of Movable Type specialists – some of them former Six Apart employees – wanted to speed up the development of the open source version of the popular publishing platform and decided to group together in a quest to build an independent, community-driven CMS for bloggers and other publishers.
The platform is dubbed Melody and will be managed by a non-profit named The Open Melody Software Group, which has Anil Dash (Six Apart’s outspoken VP and Chief Evangelist) on its board.
From what we can gather reading about the project on the website, its founders are passionate about Movable Type but see more value in forking it, community-style, “to see it flourish as a platform”. According to the FAQ section, the team is working together with Six Apart to some degree – which isn’t surprising considering Dash’ presence on the board – and strives for as much compatibility with Movable Type’s core APIs as possible. However, you can also read that the team is inspired by successful open source initiatives such as WordPress (a Six Apart rival), Apache, Linux and Firefox.
“While at its onset Melody will have a great deal in common with Movable Type from a feature perspective, we believe that by listening to and empowering our community we will unlock the true potential of open source and begin to advance the platform at a more rapid pace. To that end we intend on decoupling features that add complexity to the product, yet only a minority of users use, e.g. TrackBack and Postgres support, and increasing the level of investment in those areas that will help people become more efficient and successful in designing and building web sites using Melody, like theme building and distribution.”
As for the product, it’s not ready yet, even for beta testing. The first release (Melody 1.0) is scheduled for ‘Fall 2009′, but if you’re a developer and you can’t hold your horses than you should check out the latest development snapshot from Melody’s source code repository on Github.
Behind Melody: Tim Appnel, Jesse Gardner, Dan Wolfgang, Mark Stosberg, Jay Allen, Su, Arvind Satyanarayn and Byrne Reese.
Good that there is another Blogging software under development, may it me for Movable-type. I hope it removes all drawbacks of Wordpress and establishes itself very well so that we can make a move to MELODY soon!
Choice is always good to have so I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes. It’s going to have to have a pretty good draw factor in order to break into this market though!
perl = fail.
I think it is incredibly short sighted to reduce every product to the language it is written in and the predict future success based on that. Some of the largest and most successful web sites are powered by Perl, others Python, others Ruby, others PHP, there are even some successful sites written in Java if you can believe it.
What we hope to achieve with Melody is expand its developer base — no one is more aware of the challenges presented to us in that respect than I. That is why increasingly you will see the platform evolve to minimize and even eliminate the reliance on Perl to build plugins and themes. A good example of this is the Config Assistant framework I built which I hope makes its way into Melody in the first release.
In the end what matters most is whether the product is solid, if it is fun to use, if it is secure, and if people like to use it.
I just don’t think developers are necessarily going to want to write in Perl. I personally don’t care about the language of the product itself.
Perl is a fine language, but I think people are more familiar with PHP, especially for blogging/CMS platforms.
That’s the main thing. Sure, Perl is a great language and it’s the “glue of the Web” (and other applications), but writing in it (or worse yet reading it) can be pretty taxing.
It’s much less forgiving than PHP and – for better or for worse – it has a smaller set of built-in functions and fewer available frameworks. When someone’s learning a new scripting language, though, it’s very seldom going to be perl.
For what it is worth Melody publishes PHP and I routinely use PHP in the web sites I build with Melody/Movable Type.
Why? Because PHP is perfect for somethings whereas Melody’s templating language will not be.
To be 100%, absolutely clear: I do not code a single line of Perl when building a web site with Melody and Movable Type. Perl is exclusively for the domain of the core application – not the web sites it publishes.
If I’m not mistaken, PERL is the achilles heel of installing Movable Type locally using MAMP.
In fact, the developers could do themselves a huge favor by reworking the install process.
What will Melody do that Drupal can’t?
The folks behind Melody could not agree more. If the one thing we do for the platform is to improve the install process, then we win. IMHO. Of course our ambitions I think go well beyond just installation!
That is why work on a new installer for Melody has already begun!
Woops, that was intended as a general question, not directed at ES3
I have used MT for a variety of projects since around MT v2 and I am a huge fan. That said, although MT4x makes huge strides the energy I see in WordPress forks and efforts are enormous and Melody will hopefully bring like energy back into the MT base.
As for what Melody might do that Drupal can’t? Oy. Too big a question to ask in a forum if you want particulars. Drupal is a lot like Perl, 16 different ways to do things and maybe one is super efficient.
i’m interested in what people see as short comings of wordpress. i’m us WPMu is a large number of personal and professional projects. If there are better solutions, I’d be interested in hearing them.
Same here. I love Wordpress. I certainly would love to see a product that directly addresses the downsides of Wordpress.
I would really like to see a way to bring some of the settings to the actual sight (within the theme). Especially when a user makes a lot of comments, they need a place to keep track of their activity on the site.
It takes a lot of time and effort to come to grips with a blogging platform. For a lot of us, Wordpress does just fine.
How do you plan to lure bloggers from Wordpress to Melody? Not all of us are willing to put 10 hours to learn a new blogging platform.
Then you are fully encouraged to continue using it. MT developers have even been known to occasionally recommend WordPress, based upon people’s needs. It’s shocking, I know.
I’m not sure why you seem convinced this is a contest, but it’s not due to anything we’ve said.
I have no particular plans to lure anybody anywhere. There are enough fundamental differences between WordPress and Melody/MT that I personally think it’s up to the user to weigh the options. We’ll post features and such when they’re solidified, and everybody can make their own decision.
Puranjay: We’re not trying to lure people from any platform; we’re just trying to create a publishing platform that is reliable, scalable and wicked easy to use. If you know Wordpress and you’re good at building sites for folks, that’s awesome—it probably makes the most sense for you to keep using it. But if we’re able to create an app that saves someone just starting out time, then it will be worth my while as a Melody contributor.
tancks
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