One little known fact from the early days of blogging is that WordPress is actually a fork of a previous CMS, b2/cafelog, and we know what happened next. In 2010, there’s a new fork in town: Open Melody, a MovableType derivative. Can history repeat itself?
According to their about page, Melody “is for those who find value in belonging to, supporting and contributing to a community of helpful, passionate and devoted users, but it is also for people who want a secure, proven and high quality publishing environment for their personal web site or their business.”
The project has as it goals to – Make personal publishing easier and more enjoyable. – Create the most progressive and innovative personal publishing application available. – Inspire a thriving community of users, developers and contributors.
Doing it right from day one (vs WordPress) the contributions to Melody’s code base is held in trust by The Open Melody Software Group, a non-profit created expressly for this purpose.
There’s not a lot about the backing for Open Melody except for the board of directors, and one name stands out among the five names: Anil Dash, longtime SixApart employee and MovableType guru extraordinaire. We’ll investigate more about the group backing the effort in coming weeks.
Forks aren’t completely new in the world of CMS’s…indeed, they’re fairly common, and in the broader CMS field many never really get that far.
But Open Melody might just be different.
The market desperately needs a strong competitor to the dominant WordPress, and although SixApart previously open sourced the MovableType code base, the effort was still stuck within the walls of a for profit company, one that really couldn’t dedicate a lot of time or effort to the development of the code, particularly when their primary focus was elsewhere. Of note here is that Automattic can dedicate more time to the WordPress codebase because it still delivers the backbone of WordPress.com, where as SixApart’s TypePad had long since diverged from the MovableType code it was founded on.
One thing that may hold Melody back is the Perl code base; I don’t argue that Perl is a better or worse language for a CMS, however the superiority of WordPress in part comes down to ease of use as PHP is (according to many) a far easier language to build around, particularly when it comes to templating and plugins.
Melody already boasts that there are 163,444 lines of differences between Melody 0.9.15 and it’s corresponding MT version 4.34, and they are looking at radical changes in the plugin structure from MT; both positive starts, although ultimately the proof will be in the product delivered as to whether these changes constitute a more desirable, easier to use platform.
We look forward to watching, and following how Open Melody progresses and wish the team the best of luck. There’s no word yet on when the first official release will be available, but things do seem to be progressing. If you’re interested in contributing to the project, get details on the Melody site here.
(via Blog Herald )
