About Melody Maker

Melody Maker introduces a completely new user experience and design for Melody. Right now it is in its very early stages of development. To install and use Melody Maker you will first need to:

• Download or clone from github the melody-1.1 branch from byrnereese's github account.

Downloading Melody 1.1

• https://github.com/byrnereese/melody/zipball/melody-1.1

Cloning Melody 1.1 from Github

If you are familiar with using git, this can be done this way:

prompt> git clone [email protected]:byrnereese/melody.git
prompt> cd melody
prompt> git checkout melody-1.1

Once your version of Melody is installed you can install the Melody Maker plugin as you do any Melody Plugin.

Note: you may need to pull down updates from byrnereese/melody/melody-1.1 as the work on Melody Maker progresses, in order to take advantage of its new features.

Status Widgets

Developers can register status widgets that live in the footer of every page. There are two types of status widgets, designating how their contents are determined and/or rendered to the screen:

• counter widgets - which comprise a label and a count pill
• template widgets - whose contents are determined by a template written by the developer

Example Counter Widget

The following widget shows the total number of moderated comments on the current blog:

status_widgets:
  comments:
    label: Comments
    count_handler: $MelodyMaker::MelodyMaker::Plugin::status_comments
    mode: list_entries
    args:
      filter_key: 'unpublished'

The count handler is a subroutine that looks like this:

sub status_comments {
    my $app = shift;
    my ($ctx) = @_;
    my $app = MT->instance;
    my $blog = $app->can('blog') ? $app->blog : $ctx->stash('blog');
    my $count = MT->model('comment')->count({
        ($blog ? (blog_id => $blog->id) : ()),
        visible => 0,
        junk_status => MT->model('comment')->NOT_JUNK(),
    });
   return $count;
}

Example Template Widget

Template widgets have less meta data because their contents are wholly derived from the linked template.

status_widgets:
  some_tmpl_wid:
    template: 'foo.tmpl'

Then foo.tmpl might look like this:

Total Comments

The template is automatically seeded with the context of the containing page, which has a blog, author and sometimes an entry context already embedded.

Template widgets will allow developers to create widgets with more complex javascript functionality.

Conditional Widgets

Widgets can be made to appear only if specific conditions are present. The following is a widget that will only appear within a blog context.

status_widgets:
  comments:
    label: Comments
    count_handler: $MelodyMaker::MelodyMaker::Plugin::status_comments
    mode: list_entries
    condition: >>
      sub { return MT->instance->blog; }