The Appnel Group We didn't write the book on Movable Type -- just the manual

Breaking The Silence: Meet Melody

It’s been quiet around here for a number of months, but that is going to change. It doesn’t mean that we have not been hard at work. Quite the contrary! We’ve been at work serving clients and expanding our offerings to include Amazon Web Services offerings, cloud services, and social media strategy.

That’s not why I’m posting today though. There is something bigger.

I am pleased to announce the launch of Melody, an open source content management and publishing system derived from Movable Type.

In my personal view this is an exciting development because I feel certain that a community-based open source project will benefit users of both Melody and Movable Type.

I am proud to have participated in this project launch and look forward to working with the community and serving on the board of directors. I am also honored to be presenting Melody publicly for the first time at the YAPC::NA conference today. [UPDATE: Slides are here now. Perhaps I’ll re-record my talk since I like to speak to my slides rather than have the audience listen to me read them.]

A lot of effort has gone in to getting this started by a number of dedicated veteran (and passionate!) members of the community. Our chairman Byrne Reese gives a shout out to all who helped get this launched here. Much credit and thanks goes out to Byrne whose tireless and level-headed leadership during the process (while waiting to become a dad for the second time at any moment nonetheless) was essential to the success of this project.

There is a lot more I can say, but I’ll just refer you to the Melody site and particularly the FAQ. Here are the tops line things you’ll want to know:

• Melody is not production ready software (yet).
• Movable Type is not being replaced by Melody
• We will be working to keep backward compatibility with MT
• Melody does not include the community, pro and enterprise functionality (for now)
• Melody is open source (GPL) software whose copyright will be held by The Open Melody Software Group, a non-profit organization without commercial ties.

For those seeking to use Melody, we will be offering our full range of services in addition to Movable Type and Amazon Web Services consulting offerings.