Melody 1.0 Development In Full Swing .

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!