Welcome to Meld Solutions
...a company under development, with a lot of applications under development as well!
Meld Solutions Inc. is a new company formed with the intent of developing a host of open source solutions for the Mura Content Management System. The company is being created on top of work first developed by Clever Technology Inc. as commercial software, including Meld Forums. This product as well as several new ones are being redeveloped by Meld Solutions into open source versions.
We've created this site as our 'in process' portal so that we can not only inform but also gather feedback and suggestions. Eventually we'll be replacing it with a more comprehensive site, but for now you should consider this (and our Twitter account) as the best source of information on Meld Solutions and Meld-based applications.
The 'meld' in Meld Solutions
The 'meld' philosophy is one that incorporates environment, relationship and usability into our core philosophy of application development.
In 'environment', we are working to make Meld-based applications tie seamlessly into Mura so that wherever possible, Meld and Mura content are one and the same. In other words, a Meld user is a Mura user, Meld-created files are really Mura files, and so on.
In 'relationship', our applications will be designed to 'meld' together. All will use a common set of tools and resources so that data and content can easily be shared between them. Also, as you plug in various Meld components, new features will become available in other applications, such as linking galleries to products, forums to product categories or comment forms to product pages.
For 'usability', we will be working hard to ensure that the user experience on both the back-end and front-end are consistent and manageable. They will also be highly configurable, adapting to your needs instead of forcing you into a rigid, 'square peg/hole' scenario.
Where we are starting
The applications we are currently focusing upon are Meld Forums and Meld Ecommerce.
Meld Forums is really a re-work of the existing Clever Technology version of Meld Forums (found here), which is being re-engineered to fit not only our open source model, but also to fit within the new 'meld' application framework.
Meld Ecommerce is a new and very powerful Ecommerce system. We'll be talking about that a lot over the coming months, including some of the very versatile and powerful tools that are being developed along with it (the Meld Form Builder being the most prominent).
Your questions: a preemptive strike
Q. When will Meld Forums/Meld Ecommerce be available?
A. No fixed date has been set for either Meld Forums or Meld Ecommerce. Meld Forums is, however, available as a commercial product right now. Suffice it to say that I wouldn't count on either being available before the end of the summer (that isn't to say that you should count on either before the end of the fall, either).
Q. Will Meld Solutions applications be free?
A. We currently plan on having Meld Forums and Meld Ecommerce available with both Open Source (likely GPL 2/3, but not yet finalized) and commercial licenses to choose from (the latter for those organizations who require/desire one).
Q. What about the Clever Technology version of Meld Forums ... is development going to continue there?
A. The current Clever Technology version of Meld Forums has a couple of priority items that may be released early (specifically MS SQL support and a tables-based layout), but when it is released the Meld Solutions version of Meld Forums will replace the Clever Technology version. As mentioned above, there will still be a commercial license available for those organizations who need it.
Q. Can I contribute?
A. For now, yes and no. There will be many opportunities to provide feedback and suggestions, but actual code/development contributions won't be considered until the product has officially launched. Until then, comments and questions via the blog (and soon the forums) are the best way to contribute.
Q. I have a lot of suggestions/requirements ... where can I send them?
A. We will be putting up forums very soon in order to organize and gather feedback and suggestions.
