Melody, Movable Type’s cousin (and perhaps frenemy) is in the process of redesigning their user interface before their immanent 1.0 launch.
While the upcoming CMS is proposing a few odd changes to their future layout (i.e. putting the logo at the bottom of the admin page), the proposed layout seems eerily similar to WordPress.
Developers working on Melody are claiming that the layout is borrowed from Movable Type 3 instead of WordPress (which could be true as I’ve never tried MT3), although truth be told it does look much nicer than Movable Type 4 (as well as Typepad).
Open Melody is also planning on integrating another feature used by WordPress (that would be WP.com) that might raise concerns as to whether Melody is mimicking the best of WordPress.
One of the debates we often have as a community is what Melody should look like. Inspired by that debate Jesse Gardner took a stab at some concepts for Melody that are exciting to see. [...]
Some additional concepts we are talking about:
Being able to tack your favorite blogs into the menu so that they are always immediately accessible.
Using the same window for personalized navigation shortcuts. (Official Melody Blog)
Note: Emphasis mine.
Although popularized by Tumblr, truth be told many popular platforms (including Blogger) allow one to “follow” blogs in order to receive updates from friends without having to load an RSS reader or subscribe via email.
While there is nothing wrong with Melody adopting a clean layout as well as following blogs from within ones dashboard, hopefully the team will consider something more innovative to help differentiate itself from WordPress (as well as Movable Type).
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Movable Type 3 did have a conceptually similar user interface. An example from Flickr via Google Images.
It already does via some new features like ConfigAssistant which lets theme designers develop theme options without writing any code. Theme designers can build everything from the theme option panel in the admin console to the behavior of the theme options inside the templates with only YAML. YAML is so simple, it makes HTML look hard.
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YAML? Hmm…I’m very intrigued. ;-)
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The operative word in the blog post is “talk” and not “plan.” A lot of ideas are getting floated and discussed on the mailing list. The UI look and favorite blog pinning features not a sure thing for 1.0 or any version at this point.
Besides, WP did its fair share of borrowing from MT back in the day. We all borrow from things Google, Facebook and Twitter introduce to user collective consciences. To me any “mimicking” as a non-issue really and just a standard part of software development.
What we (I’m a board member and active contributor to the project) are doing with the UI is rather fluid at this point. Truth be told, there are a number of underlying technical issues that we have inherited that limits how far we can stray from the existing UI structure. The UI changes from MT4 to MT5 are mostly in the CSS and graphics. It’s quite likely we will need to start with a similar approach in getting 1.0 out and start methodically developing a more innovative and modern UX.
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@ Timothy: Just looking at Tumblr I can tell WP does its fair share of borrowing. ;-) I just don’t want Melody looking like a WP clone as its one of the few active platforms that has promise outside of the WP universe (Movable Type still has to prove its worth to me).
Either way I like the new UI, and will definitely test Open Melody out once 1.0 goes live. :-)
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Some history:
When Movable Type was first launched it utilized a left hand, vertical navigation system. That system persisted through every subsequent version until MT4. In MT4, the team (of which I the Product Manager at the time) decided to switch to a horizontal menu because we felt it to be more scalable. Interestingly, around the same time WordPress launched its second redesign in which it moved from a horizontal nav to a vertical one. Then MT5 was launched. It switched back to a vertical nav as well. Then Jesse began his design explorations for Melody. As a long-time MT user he missed the MT3 nav style and re-introduced it. He also felt it was a superior model to menu-based system of MT4. A conclusion it appears we all came to as evidenced by the design of our respective products, WordPress, Movable Type and Melody.
And with regards to innovative features that should differentiate Melody from WordPress – personally I consider web sites that don’t crash when all of a sudden they get popular, and a CMS that is not prone to security vulnerabilities to be *great* differentiators. Maybe they are not “innovative,” nor a feature I would ever claim Movable Type/Melody invented, but I consider them to be essential nonetheless. And the day a version of WordPress is released that claims the same capabilities, I wonder, will you report that WordPress is mimicking Melody? Or will you report that WordPress is being “innovative?”
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Thanks for the history Byrne. It seems odd that MT4 switched it to the menu style (as it does look better vertical than horizontal like Tumblr).
As far as calling out WordPress goes, we have called them out 3 (or is it 4?) times recently for copying Tumblr (at least upon WP.com). The latter did copy WordPress once, so it seems as if everyone is borrowing from each other.
As far as crashes go, it more or less depends on the hosting environment (as I’ve seen MT sites crash–not as frequently but nonetheless they do go down).
As far as security issues go, most of the ones that I’ve encountered/heard about resulted from crappy plugins, WP sites that did not update or via shared/cloud services.
Either way, I’m intrigued by Mike’s YAML reference, as that could attract theme developers in droves (as themes believe it or not help sell a user towards a specific platform).
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@Darnell: We’d agree about being satisfied with being a clone. (I don’t think Melody is now.) Rome unfortunately wasn’t built in a day. ;)
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One of the biggest myths about Movable Type and thus Melody, is that a designer needs to know Perl or a programming language to build anything. That has never been the case, but with Melody in particular we want to make that a core value. We want to surface tools almost *anyone* can use. If you know HTML and CSS, and you can edit a text file, you can build a theme. And not just any theme, a theme that can tell Melody how to configure itself to run the theme, and that can expose sane options to end users. Furthermore, if a user needs to edit the templates of a theme, they can, but they should never have to. We want to create a tighter relationship between the developer and theme so that their workflow building a theme rocks:
* Put your theme into “Designer” mode: edit a theme’s template, hit refresh in your browser and see the change – no publishing required, get instant gratification and feedback of your progress.
* When the theme is ready, throw it into “Production” mode to turn on the reliability of static publishing or what we prefer to call “pre-emptive caching.”
A *HUGE* focus for Melody is about making the platform more attractive to designers. While WordPress theme developers are creating some amazing design/theme frameworks, we are building similar and even better tools into the core application. That way there is consistency in how designers use them, and the products that are produced using them (yeah, we stole that from Apple).
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The whole “tumblr blog following” bit completely lost me. I’m pretty sure this is about being able to quickly administer several blogs from the back end – nothing to do with following or RSS feeds.
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“I consider web sites that don’t crash when all of a sudden they get popular, and a CMS that is not prone to security vulnerabilities to be *great* differentiators.”
Come on Byrne, you’re better than that!
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@Matt – Ok, I am being a little sensationalistic. WordPress has come a long way, especially on security for which the auto-update feature has had an essential roll to play. But there is some truth to the statement. WordPress whether for its popularity, or because it attracts so many developers (some of whom are not as experienced as your core committers) is more prone to security issues, threats and vulnerabilities. Melody is not perfect either, but there exist far fewer attack vectors to exploit.
Then the age-old issue of WordPress’ reliability. WordPress can be made to be incredibly reliable. WordPress.com and many other blogs are a testament to that for sure. But it is hard to argue that a pre-emptive cache in the form of static HTML is far more resilient than apps that rely upon direct access to the database just to render a page. And that static HTML feature? It’s core to Melody, while a plugin is required for WordPress.
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@Byrne …a little defensive, but I appreciate you pointing out which are apples and which are oranges. Vertical versus Horizontal is just a question of space. A Sidebar menu CAN grow and I’m sure it was just a pragmatic decision to give the items unlimited space. Last time I looked my mouse wheel scrolls up and down.