This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Perl Buzz by Andy Lester. Original Post: Movable Type fork Melody is an opportunity to harness CPAN Feed Title: Perlbuzz Feed URL: http://perlbuzz.com/atom.xml Feed Description: What's happening in the world of Perl programming, including Perl 5, Perl 6, the CPAN and Parrot? Latest Perl Buzz Posts Latest Perl Buzz Posts by Andy Lester Latest Posts From Perlbuzz

Reposted from a blog entry by Mark Stosberg

Today Melody was announced as a fork of the Perl-based Movable Type platform. I helped the Melody project as it prepared to launch, in part advising on how to best to relate to the Perl community.  One of the stated interests of Melody is to refactor the project to use CGI::Application, which I maintain. Tim Appnel has already spelled out a vision of what a "CPANization" of Movable Type might look like, and I've looked in depth at what the initial steps towards using CGI::Application could be.

My own vision for Melody is a code base that's very focused on publishing and content management, with all the infrastructure outsourced to CPAN modules that are well-written, well-documented, and well-tested.  The collaboration between Melody and CPAN would be a two-way code flow. While there are more CPAN modules that Melody could make use of, there are number of pieces of Melody which should be packaged as independent modules on their own and released to CPAN.

One example is the great "dirification" that already exists in Movable Type. This is the functionality that turns any given string of words into a reasonable representation in URLs. It seems like an easy problem on the surface, but Movable Type has a sophisticated solution that takes into account what it means to do this well across many different languages. I also couldn't find any existing CPAN module which already takes on this problem space, so I started to extract this out of Movable Type myself and published a draft of String::Dirify. For that initial release, I ripped out all the fancy multi-language support, and there is still more significant work to be done to untangle this layer from from Movable Type. (If you want to pick up that project and work on it, there's also some discussion of testing String::Dirify).

While Movable Type already had an open source release, I expect Melody to have  a more adventurous evolution, and I look forward to it becoming a shining star in the Perl community, not just for the exterior functionality, but also because internals have an opportunity to become an example of best practices.

Mark Stosberg has been using programming Perl for the web for over a decade. He is the Principal Developer at Summersault and maintains several CPAN modules including Titanium and Data::FormValidator.