Meld Solutions Inc.

The Roadmap: Meld Gallery, Ecommerce, Forums ... and MiniCommerce

Looking back at the last time we posted a blog, I'm actually stunned it's been over 3 months since we "finished" Meld Gallery and planned for it's release. With Meld Forums and Meld Ecommerce still in development as well, its hard to understand where all the time has gone.

In truth we've been focusing upon a couple of things: client work, which has the obvious tendency to take priority, a man-power shortage, and a need to actually learn more about the Mura ecosystem before we could achieve the goals we had set for our projects.

Out of all of this was born a brand new plugin, which miracle of miracles is actually complete and ready for download! This project is Meld MiniCommerce, and Ecommerce engine for the Mura CMS.

Meld MiniCommerce ... available now!

Meld MiniCommerce is our newest plugin for the Mura CMS. MiniCommerce is a highly extensible Ecommerce 'engine' that adds full product-to-merchant-processing to Mura. At it's base level it lets Mura administrators turn regular Mura pages into products, and while this might be enough for the majority of users it only scratches the surface of what MiniCommerce is capable of.

There's plenty about MiniCommerce on the website now (including a soon-to-posted blog specifically on the plugin), so I won't go into too much detail here other than to say MiniCommerce should be a game changer for both site owners wanting to add some basic Ecommerce functionality to their Mura CMS and for developers who need to add a reliable, flexible Ecommerce engine to their Mura projects. It is available right now ...albeit in a well-tested but still-Beta form. For more on Meld MiniCommerce, visit the Meld MiniCommerce product page.

Meld Gallery

Meld Gallery is a project that was complete until a couple of important factors introduced themselves to the process. First was the release of Mura 5.3. This change introduced the much improved CKEditor, but also had the effect of depricating the FCKEditor we had already integrated throughout the plugin. FCKEditor is no longer bundled with Mura, so we couldn't release the plugin until this was done.

The second factor was a couple of key functionality requests by the Blue River Interactive team themselves. Because Meld Gallery added such a huge amount of functionality to galleries in Mura, BRI wanted us to see if there was a way of integrating the current process of creating Mura galleries with their Meld counterparts. The second request was the ability to capture images attached to a Mura content page add them to the the Meld Gallery image repository.

The good news is we've worked out the mechanics of all these items, but haven't yet implemented them. With MiniCommerce now complete and available, we'll be focusing upon getting these final few items finished and Gallery out the door.

Meld Forums

Meld Forums is a project that is dear to our heart, if only because it was the first large project we developed for Mura. We have big plans for v2 in terms of flexibility and extensibility, but the only way to achieve those was to have a greater understanding of the Mura Event / Renderer model than we had when we initiated the project. Thanks in main to our work with MiniCommerce, we now have that knowledge and will be completing Meld Forums with our original aim of creating a Forum 'platform' that other services can be easily integrated into.

Roadmap to the future

Our road-map has become a lot clearer of late. With MiniCommerce complete and ready for the challenges of the real world, we'll be able to finish Meld Gallery in short order (a time frame we're measuring in weeks). Next will come Meld Forums, followed by Meld MiniStore (which in combination with Meld MiniCommerce will act as the foundation for launching Meld Ecommerce). We have other projects in the work flow, some of which have some exiting possibilities, but for now we are focusing our effort on getting our core projects complete and in release.