Movable Type Monday: More About Melody

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Happy Monday, folks! Last week, we introduced you to Melody, the new open source fork of Movable Type. In that post, I expressed my uncertainty as to the goals of this project. I also theorized that creating open source versions of commercial MT features was not one of those goals. Here’s exactly what I said:

It’s unclear at this point how this project will differ from the existing open source version of MT. Certainly, a different leadership is going to have different priorities. The Melody folks seem to be bending over backward to show this is not a break from MT, but just a separate development branch. And, similarly, Six Apart has welcomed the new project. So I doubt we’ll see any of the commercial MT features rewritten as open source modules, at least in the near term. It’s more likely we’ll see features that are useful to independent developers (and, consequently, small to medium size businesses) instead of the enterprise-level development that seems to be 6A’s focus.

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Movable Type Monday: Melody, Installation, and Edit Links

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Happy Monday, folks! The big news this week is the launch of Melody, an open source fork of Movable Type. Several long-time MT developers are contributing to the project, and a 1.0 release is expected this year.

It’s unclear at this point how this project will differ from the existing open source version of MT. Certainly, a different leadership is going to have different priorities. The Melody folks seem to be bending over backward to show this is not a break from MT, but just a separate development branch. And, similarly, Six Apart has welcomed the new project. So I doubt we’ll see any of the commercial MT features rewritten as open source modules, at least in the near term. It’s more likely we’ll see features that are useful to independent developers (and, consequently, small to medium size businesses) instead of the enterprise-level development that seems to be 6A’s focus. [Read more…]

Exploring Social Media: Time for a Web App Matching Service

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Exploring Social Media article series badgeLloyd Budd of A Fool’s Wisdom has asked a very important question in this economy and techno-world we currently live in:

Working on a small project with a friend is a great opportunity to check out tools in other parts of the web development stack. I’ve been interested in trying out some of the software project management services and software.

…Likely the best approach for this project would be to first identify our needs and wants and then work through the available web services to find the closest matches.

Like Lloyd, are you stymied as you look at all the available web services, especially in the fast growing open source market, that will meet your needs. [Read more…]

Brian Gardner Launches Revolution Two Open-Source WordPress Theme

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brian-gardner-revolution-wordpress-themeProminent WordPress theme designer Brian Gardner has released a new open-source theme set called Revolution Two to essentially replace his highly popular Revolution WordPress theme. The new theme set includes 10 themes for free downloading.

The release comes two days earlier than previously anticipated, with Gardner saying in his most recent blog post announcing the launch of the new Revolution theme, “I figure I owed you all an early release.”

That, or he really just wanted to be able to nurse his post-Halloween sugar hangover on Friday night. :)

Starting November 1, the original Revolution theme will no longer be available for purchase (although existing Revolution buyers will still receive support “for life”), except for necessary updates for 12 months to maintain compatibility with WordPress. Instead, Gardner has opted to go the open-source route for monetization, with plans to sell premium support for the free Revolution Two themes on an annual ($99.95) or lifetime ($149.95) basis.

Follow the Revolution Two project on Twitter for project updates.

Have you ever used the Revolution theme for WordPress? What do you think of the new Revolution Two themes? Do you agree with Brian Gardner’s decision to make the Revolution Two themes open-source?

Movable Type Monday: Image Gallery, REST API, Pagination

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Happy Monday, folks! I get the sense the Movable Type community is in full-on development mode right now. In the past week I’ve seen new developer documentation, proposals for MTOS, and work on a REST API. Not much has been released, though, so I think people still have their heads buried deep into code. We’ll have to wait a bit longer to see what everyone’s working, but for now there are a few interesting new things to discuss.

Image Gallery

Mike T. has a new Image Gallery plugin that allows you to add an image gallery to a blog post. Mike’s examples on his site look great, and the ability to build a gallery on the fly when you write your post seems handy. [Read more…]