So what motivated Endevver to take on this project?

First, there was a consensus among members of the Melody community that Melody's user interface be clearly different from Movable Type. Given our resources at the time, we were limited in how drastic of a change we could make, and thus limited ourselves to simply changing the Movable Type logo, and the default color scheme of the application. Those changes were necessary, but I don't think any of us felt they were sufficient.

Second, one thing that Endevver felt was always lacking in Movable Type's design was polish. Movable Type 4 offered a visually striking design, but as with most projects on a very tight schedule, as MT4's launch was, many of the user interface changes Six Apart wanted to make in conjunction with the new visual design were put on the back burner for a later release. These were all changes that taken by themselves were clearly "non-essential." They were changes that could never in a million years be mapped directly to a revenue opportunity, and because Movable Type's roadmap was so strongly driven by the enterprise and commercial markets, these features were perpetually sidelined. As a result, much of the polish envisioned for MT4 never happened.

Finally, our understanding of how people like to work within content management systems that support multiple web sites, like MT4, MT5, Drupal and now WordPress, has grown considerably since Movable Type 4 was initially released in 2007. We therefore wanted Melody to incorporate as much of this accumulated knowledge and experience into whatever we would build next.

In summary, we wanted to create a user interface for Melody that was not only differentiated from Movable Type visually, but also offered a more compelling user experience, one that was above all else the more polished than anything that had come before it.

A lot of attention in particular has been paid to how one navigates and moves between blogs. We wanted users to be able to move from one to another as efficiently as possible. To that end we have done a number of things:

• Users are allowed to maintain a list of favorite blogs that they can drag and drop blogs into.
• Users are allowed to search the system for a specific blog and navigate to it without ever having to navigate to a separate screen to do so.

But even with these great features, we found that scanning a text list of blog names was still not very efficient. Therefore we wanted to provide a way for users to more readily scan for a particular blog they might be looking for among a large list of blogs. What we came up with was the ability for administrators to optionally associate an icon with a blog. This icon is then used when presenting users with a list of blogs, so that they can more quickly scan for and find a particular blog.

This icon became a great way to customize a blog's appearance inside the application, so we added the option for users to also associate a color with their blog. When used together, each and every blog in Melody can thus be personalized and themed. This not only allows a blog to take on its own unique personality inside of the CMS, but it also helps cement within a user's mind the current context they might be operating within.

We are incredibly excited about this project and expect in the coming weeks to have a more formal release ready, when the first alpha builds of Melody 1.1 are made available. In the meantime, we hope the following screenshots will whet your appetite and peak your curiosity. If you want to participate in the project, then you are encouraged to join everyone at Endevver over at Melody's mailing list. We hope to see you there!

Dashboard

Dashboard w/Blog Selector Expanded

Blog Themes