Meld Solutions Inc.

The Meld Manager ... utilities for one and all

Core to the 'meld' philosophy is that all of our applications work together and with Mura in a seamless and consistent manner. Meld Manager ('MM' for short) is what will make that happen.

Meld Manager is a core Mura plugin that will be required and used by all Meld Solutions applications.  It will contain both a wide range of common utilities for actions such as caching, image manipulation and URL interception, to tools like Form Builder that are practically full applications on their own.  Best of all, these utilities will also be available to anybody developing their own applications, making complex tasks like profile management not only easier, but uniform across all any plugins you develop along side Meld.

Meld Manager will also make a great deal of use out of the rich function set that currently exists inside of Mura.  The intention of MM isn't to replace Mura functions, and we certainly have better things to do with our time than "re-invent the wheel", so in many cases Meld Manager will simply add to existing Mura functionality or centralize the location we communicate with the CMS.

We'll be blogging far more about these tools as they are developed, but here is a sample of what we are doing:

Utilities

While this list will be pretty fluid over time, MM utilities includes:

• mmCache
• mmFile
• mmImage
• mmUpload
• mmCategory
• mmNavigation
• mmBreadcrumb
• mmErrors
• mmDataProvider
• mmSearch
• mmRemoteConnector
• mmResourceBundle
• mmHelp
• mmValidate
• mmAddins
• mmUpdate

Again, some of those are simply 'doorways' or extensions to Mura functionality, but they will help streamline how Meld applications interact with Mura.

Applications

Meld Manager will also include a set of richer, more feature-intense sub-applications.  Many of these won't necessarily have an administrator of their own, but rather will lend interface 'views' to applications that use them.

• mmFormBuilder
• mmGallery
• mmProfileManager

Profile Manager, in particular, will be important in how Meld-based applications maintain user profile consistency between themselves.  Form Builder will add a powerful, GUI-based form creation interface to our applications, and Gallery will let content managers worry less about image management and organization and add a great deal of flexibility in presentation and integration.