As you may or may not know, Melody uses git and we love it. We use it so much, we thought we should share a bash recipe with you that helps us work more efficiently on the command line. The following recipe, when added to your .bashrc file, will allow you to use the TAB key to auto-complete any git commands, local branches and local remotes. Hit TAB twice and it will show you a list of possible matches. Very helpful.

# This command line completion script will handily autocomplete
# any git commands as well as any remotes and branches you have
# defined.
#
# Add this to your .bashrc file
complete -f -W "$(echo `git branch | sed -e s/[\ \*]//g | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | uniq`; \                                                                       
    echo `git remote | sed -e s/[\ \*]//g | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | uniq`; \                                                                                   
    echo `git | tail -23 | head -21 | cut -d ' ' -f 4`);" git

Jay Allen and Byrne Reese explain unit testing in Melody and demonstrate how to use Git to make, commit and push changes to the code from your own local repository in this live screencast recorded Wednesday, January 13th.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Not too long ago the core development team upgraded and folded into the core distribution of Melody Tatsuhiko’s PubSubHubbub plugin to make it immediately available upon download and installation. If you are like most people, you are probably asking yourself, “umm, what in the world is ‘pubsubhubbub’ and who keeps letting geeks name important internet protocols?”

Luckily I don’t have to answer these questions directly. Instead, let me refer you to the technology’s creators, Brad Fitzpatrick and Brett Slatkin, who explain very succinctly why this is cool, and admit to the obvious, “PubsubHubbub is a geeky name” (and we love you for it guys).

So why did we make this core? Easy:

• Better SEO - Pubsubhubbub is not replacing feeds, they are augmenting them and helping you to plug your site into the services that want to consume your data - like search engines, feed readers and more.

• We think this is the way servers will be handling blog subscriptions in the future, and putting this into Melody will give our users a head start on getting embedded with the technologies and services that matter.

• Pubsubhubbub is more performant and scales better. Melody is all about operational integrity and we will aggressively adopt any technology that can dramatically improve the uptime of your web site.

In our most recent community conference call, we began putting our ducks in a row for a launch of a Melody 1.0 beta. Our first line of business? Bring the product to a level of quality we feel necessary to support a community of beta testers. The best way for us to do that is to build out a robust set of unit tests that we can rely on to assure a baseline level of quality going forward.

We had a wonderful turnout at today’s free training seminar for designers; and by “wonderful” I mean we were at capacity and actually had to turn away visitors because our Adobe Connect account couldn’t accomodate everyone. I must say that it is so rewarding for me and everyone working on this project to see a turn out like this and it reaffirms that the Melody project really is poised to be a huge contender in the content management and blog publishing space.

We are currently in the process of assembling a video and screencast of today’s seminar, so if you missed it, you can always wait to see it again later on in the week when that process is complete. In the meantime, here are the slides from today’s presentation:

Update: the audio component (provided separately) is now available.

We encourage you to share the presentation with your friends and the designers you may know.

To help prepare users for the upcoming release of Melody, we will be taking time to educate as many of you as we can about how to make the most of Melody. Our initial training sessions will focus on designers and developers, and as we get closer to release will expand to include sessions for authors and content managers.

So if you are interested in learning more about Melody, about the many new features we are adding specifically for designers, and about just how easy is it to build web sites for your clients using Melody, then our first online seminar (I just can’t bring myself to use the word “webinar”) is for you. RSVP now!

Jay recently posted this video to the openmelody mailing list. Jay is Melody’s Code Ranger and is responsible for wrangling all of the changes and contributions being made by the community. In addition to being a git expert, he is also our resident git evangelist and has donated a tremendous amount of his time to teaching us all how to use git in order to make our lives as developers easier. Everyone he has introduced git to has loved it, especially theme designers who have, until git, had no easy way to manage and collaborate upon building a web site with other designers and developers.

The video below caught my attention, not just because it provides a great technical background on git, but because it was given by Randall Schwartz — one of the most recognizable names in the Perl community because most of us learned Perl by reading his books.

When Melody was first announced it was difficult for us as a team and community to answer the one question most people had: “what features are going to be in it?” That was a difficult primarily because Melody is what we like to call a “do-ocracy” in which the features and roadmap are driven first and foremost by those willing to step up and actually do the work to make it happen; and until we had a group of people actually doing something, we wouldn’t really know what features Melody 1.0 might have.

Well much has changed now that the community is growing and contributions are on the rise. We now have a lot of stuff getting actually getting done, and as a result Melody 1.0 is starting to take shape. So to finally answer the question so many people have had, here is the first overview of what we are currently anticipating to be in Melody 1.0:

• Revision Histories - Revision Histories will allow administrators, designers and users to maintain a history of all the changes that have been made to pages, posts and templates. Users can view diffs, rollback to prior versions and more.

• Full-screen Editor Mode - Melody’s template, entry and page editing screens will all feature the ability to expand the main text editing area to the full width of the page in order to give users the ability to edit their content more easily and with fewer distractions.

• Real-time Web Support - Melody has the technology to deliver your blog posts in real time to a new breed of applications like Google Reader — all of the immediacy of something like Twitter, with none of the limitations presented by RSS.

• Enhanced User Interface - A number of key screens in the application having to do with blog, plugin and web site configuration have been redesigned to be more efficient to use and navigate.

• Russian Language Support - A Melody community member has contributed a Russian translation which we hope to bundle or make available upon release.

• New Logging Framework - Melody’s replaces its proprietary logging system with a powerful, world-class, open source logging framework that is used the world round by countless professional web hosts and site operations team. One key advantage of the new system: the ability to be notified via email or IM of critical error messages that occur.

• Enhanced Theme Configuration Options - Designers will rejoice in knowing that Melody significantly reduces the amount of technical knowledge anyone must have in order to build a robust, feature rich theme. Know HTML? Can you edit a config file? Then you can build world-class themes for Melody. No joke.

• New, Social Media Ready Theme - Melody provides a major overhaul to the theme available to users right out of the box - with robust theme options to enable Twitter and Facebook integration with the click of a button, advanced AJAX threaded commenting, and more.

• jQuery Support - Melody 1.0 will begin the process of phasing out all proprietary javascript libraries in favor of a much more widely used, adopted and documented framework: jQuery.

• Web Framework Compatibility - Melody is taking the important step in deprecating a number of APIs and coding conventions whose presence has long hindered Movable Type’s support for web frameworks like Catalyst, mod_perl, mod_perlite and the new kid on the block: Plack.

• Road to a Slimmer Core - Melody has an aggressive roadmap to remove old code that should be no longer in use to help make Melody faster and trimmer. To assist developers plan accordingly new warnings will be issued whenever deprecated template tags, or coding conventions are used.

• Documentation - Yes, documentation is a feature, and so far more hours has been put into improving documentation than any other single feature being developed for Melody. When Melody 1.0 is released we will have completed a Melody Templating Language Primer, a Designers Guide to Melody, a Developers Guide to Melody, and a Melody Theme Reference Manual.

And that is just the beginning as more and more people are stepping up to help every week. Follow along with us on twitter (@openmelody) as we bring more and more features online, and subscribe to this blog to be the first to be notified when the Melody 1.0 beta begins!

Even though Melody is a fork of Movable Type, we wanted Melody in many respects to be a fresh start for the product and platform. In starting fresh we wanted to re-evaluate the entire contribution chain to make sure it was as frictionless as possible. Central to any open source project and the ease at which people can contribute is the source code control system. Now traditionally Movable Type has been managed using subversion and for the many advantages over its predecessor cvs, subversion this day and age seems anachronistic in that it architected around a highly centralized single repository.

Enter git.

For those of you who missed today’s call, it was a lively one that you might find very interesting if you care about how the Melody sausage is going to be made, particularly that spicy Melody 1.0 variety.

You can listen to the entire call below (or subscribe to the podcast), find out more details about the this call or about all past and future Open Melody conference calls

Next call: July 24th, 2009 at 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific