Meld Solutions update for May 07, 2010
This is the first of our regular end-of-week updates on the progress of our Meld Solution projects. As a reminder, all of these projects will be released with open source licenses.
It was actually an important week in development, in that the traction we had on keeping to our Meld Ecommerce timeline was slipping ... and put back on track by none other than Matt Levine of Blue River (a.k.a. Mura) himself! We discussed his experiences with releasing Mura (then Sava), and his valuable insights have focused our attention on the important, core pieces of the application.
Meld Forums
We are working on bringing a new version of Meld Forums, which is going to include the following:
- MS SQL support
- Mura event-driven plugin extensions
- Several plugin examples
- More complete developer documentation
We have the MS SQL version mostly integrated and working, though the lack of a MySQL LIMIT tag made it more difficult / complicated than we'd hoped. We're also going to be releasing this as a "Meld Proto" application as this version will not be integrated into our Meld Manager framework until the next release. This means that it won't be tied in to the Meld core or be nearly as flexible, but we'd rather get it out there sooner than later.
Meld Events
This too is a bit of a one-off application, not Meld Manager-oriented but likely to be released as an interim "Proto" application. There's a fair bit of gear-work to be done to turn it from a fairly client-specific project into something more generic, and the timelines for this are a little longer than Meld Forums, but we hope to have it available some time before the fall. I'll blog about the feature set in the future, but suffice it to say it has a pretty good set of both base functionality and extensibility.
Meld Ecommerce
This, of course, is our primary focus. We are now to the point where we are building stock products, 'stock' in that they do not yet use the GUI-based template builder (via Meld FormBuilder). The template builder is one of our core goals for version one, as it lets users create product templates that exactly match the products they are entering. The other core features will be the event-driven extensions model, which will allow developers to add their own functionality, and of course integration with the Meld Manager framework.
MeldSolutions.com
We're also going to be putting more work into this 'development' site as well, adding forums and product feature pages. Our full 'production' site will eventually replace this version, but for now this is the best place for getting information on what's going on with Meld Solutions.
Also, we will be at CFUnited again this year, and while we haven't decided if we'll have a booth or not (it mainly depends upon where we are at with Meld Ecommerce), we will be happy to answer any questions you might have.
