The Appnel Group

Breaking The Silence: Meet Melody

2009-06-23T18:59:40Z

It’s been quiet around here for a number of months, but that is going to change. It doesn’t mean that we have not been hard at work. Quite the contrary! We’ve been at work serving clients and expanding our offerings to include Amazon Web Services offerings, cloud services, and social media strategy.

That’s not why I’m posting today though. There is something bigger.

I am pleased to announce the launch of Melody, an open source content management and publishing system derived from Movable Type.

In my personal view this is an exciting development because I feel certain that a community-based open source project will benefit users of both Melody and Movable Type.

I am proud to have participated in this project launch and look forward to working with the community and serving on the board of directors. I am also honored to be presenting Melody publicly for the first time at the YAPC::NA conference today. [UPDATE: Slides are here now. Perhaps I’ll re-record my talk since I like to speak to my slides rather than have the audience listen to me read them.]

A lot of effort has gone in to getting this started by a number of dedicated veteran (and passionate!) members of the community. Our chairman Byrne Reese gives a shout out to all who helped get this launched here. Much credit and thanks goes out to Byrne whose tireless and level-headed leadership during the process (while waiting to become a dad for the second time at any moment nonetheless) was essential to the success of this project.

There is a lot more I can say, but I’ll just refer you to the Melody site and particularly the FAQ. Here are the tops line things you’ll want to know:

Melody is not production ready software (yet).
Movable Type is not being replaced by Melody
We will be working to keep backward compatibility with MT
Melody does not include the community, pro and enterprise functionality (for now)
Melody is open source (GPL) software whose copyright will be held by The Open Melody Software Group, a non-profit organization without commercial ties.

For those seeking to use Melody, we will be offering our full range of services in addition to Movable Type and Amazon Web Services consulting offerings.

Cloud of Crap

2008-10-01T21:21:59Z

The term “cloud computing” is the marketing buzzword of the moment that the industry is overusing and abusing a lot these days. I’m sure I will too if I haven’t already.

Larry Ellison, whom I am no fan of, called it when I said cloud computing is just what we’ve been doing for years. Perhaps that is a bit of an overstatement, but true for the most part.

This Tech Crunch piece by Steve Gillmor is a total piece of nonsensical crap on “the cloud” that tips the scales.

I think I’m pretty familiar with the general idea of the cloud and what is happening in the industry and I’m not sure what Steve is saying or even getting at. He seems rather aloof making insinuations that Microsoft has some amazing grand plan that is going to dominate the space or is on top of the whole cloud computing trend without explaining or even linking to the basis of his insinuations. If I have misunderstood his message it only proves how poorly written it is in communicating its message.

Microsoft has only proven that they are a lumbering dinosaur that doesn’t get where the Internet is going. It has steadfastly has clung to living on past glories with its fat client cash cows hoping to squeeze out one more quarter of ridiculous profits. With an OS no one wants (Vista) and the PC industry hurting to make a profit while every other Microsoft business unit hemorrhaging money except for the Windows OS and Office monopoly, the company is in poor position to do anything noteworthy, if at all, in could computing making Gillor’s article even more astounding and nonsensical.

Save the date. Save the enterprise.

2007-10-23T18:56:47Z

Six Apart recently announced that they will be hosting a webinar with analysts about “Enterprise 2.0” on October 30th at 10:30 PDT.

The “2.0” overused jargon offense aside, it should be an informative event for those contemplating blogs and other social media in the space. I’ll be listening in.

Holiday Cheer

2006-12-15T16:55:53Z

My backlog of noteworthy links regarding all things Movable Type (MT) and Six Apart has gown quickly. Here's what new and noteworthy.

On a recent ProNet conference call (UPDATE: A recording of this conference call has been posted on Odeo.), Byrne Reese said the company has decided to forego the formal Movable Type 3.5 release as reported in my last Applets post and head right into MT 4.0. This makes sense a lot of sense to me and isn't surprising other then the effort and recent announcement that has gone into "wheeljack", the code name for what would have been MT 3.5. Byrne reported that 4.0 will be developed ~~"in a very public way"~~ "out in the open" and "transparently". More information will be forthcoming after the holidays.

I'm excited and cautiously optimistic at the same time about the prospect of Movable Type 4.0.

I am excited because I have no doubt that Six Apart will take this opportunity to fold all of its lessoned learned from MT's growth and existing user base along with the development of TypePad and Vox. I have it on good word that EVP Michael Sippey, whom was instrumental in designing the user experience of TypePad and Vox and I have a great deal of respect and trust in his ability, will be involved in design of MT 4. In this regard I expect the results to be awesome.

I am cautiously optimistic about what this will mean for the programmers interface and technical architecture we make our money with. Anyone who frequents the ProNet and mt-dev mailing list knows that I have been frustrated with the quality of MT's code and technical design since version 3. While great features and experience design will mean a lot to the product's success going forward, how they are implemented will also impact its success in how fast and how far it goes. I see MT 4 as an opportunity to "hit the reset button" and lay a strong foundation for where MT is going and not necessarily support how MT used to work. Further I see the MT 4 effort as an opportunity to forge even stronger ties with the open source community and address its nay-sayers. I'll have a lot more to say about this later.

Byrne also reported that progress to add support for Oracle's Content Database and Single Sign On (SSO) system in Movable Type Enterprise that we can look forward to in the next month or so.

Mena Trott spoke at the LeWeb conference in Paris on Vox and personal blogging. e-consultancy summarizes here talk reporting that One in 10 posts on Vox are the result of prompts from the service's question of the day. Mena noted that a recent Pew Internet study found 76% of bloggers write for friends and family. The e-consultancy post also lists Six Apart's 7 principles for personal blogging.

The Pew Internet study is interesting, but I'm curious how the personal nature of blogging translates to business. Many of the herald successes of blogging in business today are very public. Is it possible that this trend would apply to business where friends and family become co-workers and colleagues? I think so.

The Financial Times interviews Mena about the LeWeb conference reaction and fallout during her visit to London. Incidentally, the London Times featured Mena in a piece discussing blogosphere civility and the incidents of the prior year when the conference was called Les Blogs.

Speaking of conferences, Tim O'Reilly announced the Tools of Change Conference on the O'Reilly Radar weblog. (The Radar weblog is some of our work.) The call for participation is open till January 22, 2007. This looks really good and I hope to attend the event when it rolls around in June.

Six Apart's Anil Dash notes a post by Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny were he lists some of the best traits of great business blogs:

there’s some personality in the writing

they write about stuff that’s interesting to me (or they write it in an interesting way, and that gets my attention)

they post frequently

they write about stuff that’s not always blatantly self-promotional

Like Anil, I can't agree with Jeremy more.

Anil also notes VC Fred Wilson's piece in Business 2.0 on the value of blogging in business.

Fred's venture capital firm, Union Square Ventures, is a client of The Appnel Group.

Former Movable Type Product Manager Jay Allen shares his his experiences using blogs in beta testing. One point he makes is "The blog is an excellent way to keep people apprised of progress in the beta and to highlight important announcements or answer frequently asked questions." Having been one of the beta testers Jay used to communicate through a beta blog, I agree though I would note that keeping people apprised of progress should always be happening and not just during beta testing. This was a source of great frustration for me as a beta tester that Six Apart has better addressed by making the latest development build of MT available to anyone.

37 Signals asks "why are you not hiring remote workers?" In the age of the open Internet, I've wonder this myself especially of the ones who develop and market social media tools for communicating and collaborating with the people that matter with you most. (No, I'm not burnt.)

The case for OpenID, a decentralized digital identity system, continues to build a head of steam going into 2007. OpenID was originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick of Six Apart's LiveJournal division. The effort has gain the support of numerous industry players such as Verisign and Sxip. Phil Windley summarizes a recent presentation on OpenID at the Internet Identity Workshop (2006B).

Following up on his Choices = Headaches post, Joel Spolsky discusses Simplicity and Elegance in software design. Good stuff delivered plenty of comical relief Spolsky is known for.

Happy Holidays!

November Leftovers

2006-12-02T03:11:43Z

Where did the month go? This post is a quick summary highlights some of the many noteworthy happenings of the past month in the world of Six Apart and web applications in general.

The biggest news wasn't even in November. Six Apart officially launched Vox, Six Apart's new blogging tool with social networking features and privacy controls, which was heavily covered in the press and praised by many throughout the month of November. Here is one such article from the MIT Technology Review.

Co-Founder Mena Trott was busy with the press talking up the company's new product and the vision behind it. The Economist profiled her in The Universal Diarist. She was also interviewed by MarketWatch (a former The Appnel Group client) blogger, Bambi Francisco.

While Vox is not anything we'd be offering services around or that business users would find much use in, it does provide a glimpse of where blogging tools are heading. Vox is about "intimate" media of using blogging to communicate with your group of family and friends. With a bit of re-factoring these same tools could be applied to business use and "confidential" media that is common in the enterprise.

There was plenty of news for the enterprise also. Coming on the heels of Movable Type Enterprise 1.5 the month before, the company along with its partners SocialText and NewsGator amongst others announced Suite Two at the Web 2.0 Summit.

Suite Two is a bundling of Enterprise weblog, wiki and syndication tools along with support services on a Intel powered server from Dell or NEC.

The companies will be offering be integrating their offerings to include a single sign in facilities and a dashboard view of content across all the systems. It too was heavily covered in the industry press including this article from Information Week.

The suite won't be available until the first quarter of next year so details are a bit vague. Some early screenshots from the Suite Two integration have been released.

While its too early to judge, I think this is a good step in the right direction I would have preferred Six Apart to offer just their Enterprise tool pre-loaded on a server before taking on the challenges of bundling and integrating with other vendors like this.

Six Apart held a Blogging Business Seminar in San Francisco on the 13th of the month followed by a ProNet Hackathon the following day in the office. We were happy to been able to attend both.

At the seminar Six Apart laid out its current roadmap for Movable Type stating it will deliver version 3.5 in Q1 of 2007 and will follow-up with version 4.0 in Q3.

Much of what is in store for version 3.5 (code name "wheeljack") has been appearing in Six Apart's code repository. MT developer Arvind Satyanarayan has made posts previewing roles and groups, blog cloning and interface enhancements that have already made their way into the enterprise product in addition to assets management. Also announced was a new import/export tool based on the Atom Syndication Format with some extensions.

Version 4.0 will feature a new interface and advanced database features such as caching and partioning that comes from their work on TypePad and Vox.

Six Apart also announced their intention to release a new spinoff product call MT-Publisher. An approximate release date was not disclosed and details were some what vague. This tool will be more of a traditional content management tool built on MT's easy to use interface and framework. Features listed included a profile history, enhanced template management and workflow capabilities, podcast integration and advanced statistics.

For the more technically inclined Six Apart announced the Open Media Profile which merges Atom, Open Search and Yahoo's Media extensions to enable users to "search and find content to blog about from all over the Internet." DeWitt Clinton, author of the OpenSearch specification, blogs about it here.

Also of particular note to publishing tools everywhere was the announcement that Yahoo and Microsoft have agreed to join Google in their support of their Sitemap Protocol. According to the protocol's official site "Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling." Traditionally search engine have crawled pages and tried to discover links to new content in addition to discovering updates to what they had already indexed. The Sitemaps protocol provides guidance to these search engine crawlers to what is available and how often it should check back.

Phew -- that was a lot. Hopefully thing will slow down for the holidays so we can digest all of this activity.

Introducing Blogcast

2006-11-13T15:00:00Z

I am pleased to officially announce the launch of Blogcast, our integrated bundle of Movable Type software, services and hosting for organizations who need a sophisticated weblog publishing system without the hassle.

As I like to say, it's like having an Movable Type professional on staff, but at a fraction of the cost.

Find out how we take care of the hard, boring and on-going technical stuff so you can focus on publishing to your blogs.

The Movable Type Hack-A-Thon

2006-11-07T21:28:23Z

Six Apart has announced they are holding the first Movable Type Hack-a-thon on Tuesday November 14, 2006. Developers of all types can participate by coming into the company's office in San Francisco or collaborating online. Just sign up on the wiki if you are participating.

Six Apart says they will have an ongoing conference call open through out for those looking to participate remotely. Another good option is to get on the #movabletype IRC channel on freenode.net the day of the event -- or any time for that matter.

I'll be making the trip out west to be on hand for the event and coinciding with the Business Blogging Seminar being held the day before. I'm looking forward to participating in both.

I'm not sure what I'll be hacking on since I have so many ideas. Here are the few I have in mind currently.

Atom Import/Export tool for MT
Get a debugged and tested version of Typist completed. Subversion code repository is here
Ruby like class associations for Data::ObjectDriver. Perhaps a bit ambitious, but I would love to have this.

Decisions. Decisions. This should be fun.

Lending a Helping Hand to Vanity Fair

2006-10-24T19:03:30Z

Last week Vanity Fair launched a redesign of their site including the integration of the weblog of the magazine's noted political pundit James Wolcott.

We were glad to have assisted in porting Wolcott's Movable Type weblog to a TypePad Business Class account and integrating it with the larger Vanity Fair site powered by Interwoven.

Moving to TypePad Business Class provided Vanity Fair with robust blogging capabilities that, through its use of open industry standards, made it a breeze to integrate with its sophisticated CMS system.

We don't just do Movable Type work. Contact us to learn how we can help you with your TypePad needs.

Six Apart Releases MT Enterprise 1.5

2006-10-24T18:25:33Z

Last week Six Apart announced the availability of Movable Type Enterprise (MTE) 1.5. The Enterprise release builds on the foundation laid by the standard edition by allowing for easy administration of thousands of users and integration with common enterprise software platforms. New to this release:

Account provisioning including the ability to define preset designs and settings for fast and administration-less creation of new blogs.
Role and group management that builds on its LDAP authentication for more sophisticated and distributed user management
Support for Microsoft SQL Server

These are much-needed and vital features for the management and operation of large-scale use of weblogs such as a corporation or even a university.

The transition from being a personal blogging tool and the darlings of the blogosphere has been challenging for the company. Public opinion from the very vocal blogosphere and open source community has been largely been again the company's efforts to turn a profit and embrace this new audience for its tool. While the company still has a ways to go and its success not guaranteed, this release demonstrates that strides its making and its commitment to seeing the transition through.

Some excellent analysis and reviews can be found here:

Movable Type Enterprise 1.5 Launched [Read/Write Web]
Blogging the Enterprise with Six Apart [CMSWire]

We have years of experience working with Movable Type including the Enterprise edition. Contact us for more information Movable Type Enterprise and our enterprise services such as MT JumpStart.

Intel Blogs

2006-10-10T22:07:03Z

Yesterday IT@Intel, Intel launched their first public weblog, with the assistance of The Appnel Group.

Working through Textura Design we were responsible for the technical architecture and implementation of the Movable Type Enterprise system that powers the site. Several of our plugins were used including a preview release of our forthcoming Tags.App plugin.

Being a high-profile company like Intel, we worked to secure the system and prepare it to handle a significant amount of traffic as their blogging efforts expand.

The design is a simply elegant representation of Intel's brand that makes good use of tags to reflect the evolutionary nature of the conversation the company is welcoming with its customers.

We welcome Intel and look forward to what they will contribute to the space.

You've Come A Long Way Baby

2006-10-09T21:18:47Z

Movable Type, the venerable weblog tool and our weapon of choice, turns five years old. That means we've been using MT for about 4 years 10 months now.

It's been quite a trip watching the tool grow up from personal blogging tool for Blogger refugees to an enterprise class tool for communicating and collaborating in business. Originally a hobby and side project of Ben and Mena Trott, MT has become the flagship product of a upstart technology company (Six Apart) with a worldwide staff of 125 serving around 20 million users. During this time, blogging has grown from a practice of early adopter tech enthusiasts and blossomed into a phenomena that is altering media and communications as we've come to know it.

Congratulations to Ben and Mena and the rest of Six Apart. We're looking forward to what the next 5 years (and more!) brings.

The MT Plugin Life Follow-Up

2006-10-05T16:46:53Z

About a month ago I made a post disclosing the figures behind my commercial plugin downloads and licenses. With paid licenses falling well short of the effort I put into them, I wondered aloud if there is a commercial plugin market for MT and if so, what needs to change.

I've been tied up with helping others patch their MT installs, client work and, oddly enough, plugin development. It's high time I recap some of the feedback my post generated and present some of my opinions based on it. (There once was a time were I was quite good at mailing list summary posts.)

First I should mention that I am grateful for all of the insightful responses and discussion posted in the comments here and on the ProNet mailing list. I have listened and have spent a fair bit of time these past weeks starting to implement the suggestions. I held back another beta of Feeds.App 3.0 until recently while I rewrote the marketing copy and furthered the documentation. I've also held releasing Tags.App 2.0 until I can do the same. I still have a lot more to work on, but it's a start that I hope many will find helpful.

Generally, It would seem that those who commented feel there is not much of a market for commercial plugins though the reasons and outlook varied as did suggestions for improving the market.

Dan Wolfgang wrote:

Unfortunately, my opinion is that no, commercial plugins are not viable, for a combination of all the reasons you cited and more.

Here's the "and more" part: based on my point of view and what I've learned talking to others, if your plugin adds a really good feature it's going to be a failure. In the long term, if your plugin is a good idea that many can use, it's going to become part of the MT core. That can quickly turn into a game where you try to guess how long your plugin will be useful and what the shorter-term income it generates will total--is it worth the effort? Tags.App sounds like a good example of this.

He went on the share his experience as a plugin developer as did a number of others with similar outlooks.

One interesting response to my question of a viable commercial plugin market came from Kevin Shay:

My short answer is: "Maybe, in Japan."

He noted that his RightFields plugin only began to catch on because of a post made by Six Apart Japan tech guru Tatsuhiko Miyagawa. This is despite the interface and documentation never having been translated into Japanese.

The idea of the Japan market having great potential had occurred to me. Look at this Google Trends chart (source) comparing the search interest of WordPress (blue) and Movable Type (red) searches.

It shows WordPress being ahead of MT in all areas except one. Unlike all other languages, MT blows away WP in Japanese language searches. Also note that MT's Japanese language bar is the biggest by far of any on the whole chart. When I saw a similar chart recently this trend really got my attention. I assume that because of the language barrier that this success is "lost in translation."

Arvind Satyanarayan offers the only really positive outlook for the commercial plugin market sharing the figures of his 14 plugins.

Arvind wins the award for best idea. He requires an email address in order to download the plugin and later uses that email address to follow-up with that user. He admits to being a bit nervous to how this would be received, but found that reaction was positive overall. He said the personal touch has helped him solicit feedback and increased payments.

This is definitely something I intended to implement on my own site. I don't believe hiding the documentation and disclosing it via email is the way to go though. Its clear from the comments following my post that documentation is too important in making the sale. I intend on using TypeKey since it requires an account and valid email address to use the service.

While Arvind feels that he is successful, Dan Wolfgang notes:

...I think Arvind's work also backs up the idea that it's not a money-maker. A quick comparison: nearly $585 from 14 plugins is notably worse than Tim's $193.71 for 1 plugin.

Agreed. Not comparing life situations, Arvind is averaging less then $42 a plugin. This does not come close to most developers definition of viable. It would be interesting to know if one of Arvind's plugins or perhaps even a few gross more then others. These numbers also don't take into consideration differences in pricing scheme. (Pricing is a topic which was not discussed that does need to be addressed.)

Issues of viability aside many suggestion to improving the market where floated.

The first theme to emerge was the need for better information on what a plugin does and how it works. Put another way, plugins like mine need to do a better job of selling.

Bruce Prochnau posted a good summary:

I know that plugin sales improve with:
1: Good documentation.
2: Examples of code that drop in and work.
3: Support
4: A live demo is perfect. Sites using it also great.

Setting the issue of support aside for a later post, I must agree that my plugins are a bit of a mess in this regard and certainly need to improve.

I'm a coder first and foremost, so selling and marketing don't come naturally even though I come from a family of sales, marketing and small-time entrepreneurs. Task switching from debugging some deep seated bug to then writing good marketing copy is a pain in the back side. One of my frustrations is that this requires even more time, especially since there is no framework put in place for these things. I've been forced to make this stuff up as I go and learn through trial-and-error which burns a lot of cycles. I don't mind putting in the work; however, the revenue stream is such that I can't afford the amount of time I'm being forced to burn.

Dan Wolfgang said:

Good documentation requires a lot of work, including many rounds of writing, rewriting, editing, re-editing, and following the steps.

Having written my fair share of documentation, including the MT 3.2 manual, I completely agree. Good documentation looks deceptively easy, but takes a lot of time and effort.

That's still no excuse though. Better docs is a point well taken that I intend to do something about. It will take time and effort, but I intend on arriving.

Another theme that came up more then any other was the issue of promotion.

Developer Chad Everett wrote I have no doubt that just knowing that the plugin is there is likely what keeps the numbers low. He noted the community forums being up and down or well-populated and plugin directory not being used or maintained as contributing to this issue.

For instance, Dan Wolfgang noted that at the time of his message the top most link in the Plugin Directory at the time to the plugin's page was broken. The orange ENCLOSURES 1.4 link mangles the URI and the user never gets to the authors page.

Mark Carey offered two good suggestions for spreading the word about plugins. He offered that MT commercial licenses could ship with plugins Six Apart thinks are useful in addition to linking to the plugins directory. He also suggested a newsbox feed in MT admin UI that displays a feed of plugins.

Both are good ideas. I'd personally take a different spin on the newsbox and would like to see ways of communicating with users after they've installed a plugin. This could simply be a link to a syndication feed and a way of communicating a new version of a plugin is available.

Six Apart staffer and plugin developer Bryne Reese offered his opinions. He noted that Movable Type is being marketed to a business and enterprise market and is no longer a personal tool. Under the heading "Know your market, know your customer" had this to say:

On the flip side, MT Enterprise can have a price tag of $10k-$50k. Under these circumstances, paying a little extra (say $99) is NOTHING to the customer. Why? Because the budget is already exists with the buyer, and the enterprise customer actually wants to pay you because an enterprise can never afford to not pay you for a legitimate license. So you have willingness to pay, and you have money on the table - what more could you ask for?

Coming from someone who works for Six Apart I found this statement worrisome because it shows a general lack of understanding to how enterprise software sales work.

In response to Byrne's statement, Michael Boyle asked "Does MT certify (and sell) 3rd-party plugins for the Enterprise?" He continues:

I don't know that it's reasonable to even casually discuss Enterprise sales and plugins if not. Six Apart is likely the smallest vendor many Enterprise clients will ever deal with - so expecting plugin vendors to be able to sell to them is quite unrealistic. The enterprise customer may WANT to pay, but also may not realistically be ABLE to pay, at least not easily.

Even if they can pay (which honestly if it happens will usually mean a manager buys the plugin license on his personal credit card and expenses it to get around the purchasing process) that's not the only hurdle. Without certification, I doubt many compliance managers and such would ever allow a plugin in an MT-E install anyhow.

Does Six Apart have definite, published plans about all of this side of things?

Given my 15 years of enterprise IT experience I have to agree with what Michael says. Some type endorsement system along with co-sales and co-marketing is essential to any type of commercial plugin viability right now. Unfortunately no response was offered by Six Apart to Michael's question.

How are small third party developers to know what enterprise customer problems are? It's unlikely an enterprise customer is going to blog about it or make a post to the ProNet mailing list. I have access to a few corporate clients, but I would assume Six Apart has a lot more access and insight than all plugin developers combined. Six Apart has nothing in place to disseminate this information though.

Shortly after my post Six Apart devoted their bi-weekly ProNet conference call to the topic of my post. Unfortunately technical difficulties kept me from joining the call, no matter how hard I tried. (The call was powered by freeconferencecall.com and, well.... you get what you pay for.)

I know some discussion involved the idea of plugin certification. It seems that this notion is being overblown for what is needed. I'll reserve the rest of my commentary for another post. This one is already too long.

Like I said I never made it on the call to make much of a report here. Perhaps someone who did can post something in the comments here?

Where does this leave the viability of a commercial plugin market?

It's still unclear really, but I think that this conversation so far has given it a bit more clarity.

Wayne Bremser perfectly sums up why a viable plugin market needs to emerge when he wrote to the ProNet list "the fact that [plugins] exist makes MT a compelling product to build sites with. Every new project has unique needs and the library of plugins is the thing that gives me the confidence to recommend the MT platform to a client."

I believe there could be a viable market for commercial third-party plugins; however, the jury is still out. Based on the feedback my post garnered I'd say whether or not one forms around MT is mostly up to Six Apart. It will depend on their success in selling MT to the enterprise space and, just as importantly, whether they actively promote and nurture the third party plugin space in a meaningful way. Without Six Apart's direct involvement and considerable support I see little changing.

This said, plugin developers need to do a better job selling/marketing their commercial plugins. It requires time and effort, but without it they have little chance of amounting to anything.

Enough for now. What do you think?

An Important MT Security Update

2006-09-27T15:08:42Z

Six Apart has announced the release updates for both Movable Type and Movable Type Enterprise to fix a number of vulnerabilities found in a routine security evaluation of the code bases. The company is calling this a mandatory update due to the severity of the combined vulnerabilities.

These vulnerabilities were discovered by Six Apart's team during a routine security evaluation. None of these vulnerabilities are being actively exploited.

The company has made patches to MT 3.2 and 3.32 available. Users running other versions will need to do a full install of one of the new versions being released along with these patches. MT Enterprise customers can download version 1.03 and install it or request a patch for version 1.02 from the company.

Living the MT Plugin Life

2006-09-05T15:35:31Z

Is there a viable market for commercial Movable Type plugins?

This is a question I've been contemplating for a while. I've had my hunches, but until this weekend I haven't sat down and crunched the numbers I had been collecting. According to the data it doesn't seem like there is a market as of yet, and without a significant turn of events there probably won't be.

Before I go on I just want to point out in no uncertain terms that this post is not meant to be a rant or accusatory of any one person, company or group. I'm simply laying out the numbers I've collected as a commercial Movable Type plugin developer and making some interpretations. I'm hoping by sharing this information to get more insight on the matter and initiate some conversation.

So why commercial plugins? The commercial part is easy. Movable Type is a commercial product with a developer community and programming interfaces. This sets the groundwork for a commercial ecosystem that extends beyond the product. So far this has mainly existed as consulting and hosting services. That said there is no reason this ecosystem cannot extend to add-on software.

Plugins (commercial or not) play an important part in MT's viability as a publishing tool because Six Apart cannot address all the functionality of all users. It is not practical or financially feasible to believe they could if they tried, and I believe Six Apart knows that. One need not look further than the growing developer's programming interface. (We'll leave out the issues of documentation for this post.) What all of this means is that there is an opportunity for software developers to add value to the platform.

One way developers can add value is through creating specific solutions for a given need that only one user will get any value from. I call these "custom" plugins. These are the plugins that a consultant like myself will typically create as part of a project for a client. This is all fine and well established; however, it's expensive particularly in the areas of time and maintenance.

So, I've had this theory that there is benefit for clients and myself to productize the type of consulting that I do into plugins that provide some commonly requested functionality that has not yet made it onto Six Apart's product roadmap for one reason or another. In productizing what would typically require an experienced developer to create, the overall cost is shared by many thereby lowering the price per system. This seems to make total sense on paper.

On a more personal level I enjoy developing commercial plugins because they tend to be more challenging than any MT project I've done to date. They press me to learn more about MT. Product development is what interests me. I spent 12 years in the custom enterprise consulting services space before I started Appnel Solutions. The last couple of those years were spent studying and evaluating commercial software products for the firm I worked for. (Incidentally this is how I came across MT in the first place.)

So while there theoretically should be a viable space for commercial plugins, my experience doesn't indicate that in practice this is true.

To support this view and to facilitate some conversation I'm going to "open up the books" on my commercial plugins. Feeds.App is my first commercial plugin and the one I've put the most effort into. It provides the best view into into my experience so far; however, Tags.App says a few things also.

Gross revenue for Feeds.App up until Sept 4th was $3050. That's an OK sum if you were to consider this as extra revenue and not a primary source of income. It's not though. Given the amount of time and effort it takes to come close to the level of quality Six Apart has set with MT, this is a pretty low return on investment. You have to put a lot of time and effort into a plugin of any sophistication. When you are a consultant whose primary stream of income is your time, this figure simply falls short.

I don't keep track of the time I spend developing my plugins, but it's in the hundreds of hours. For Feeds.App 3 I estimate that I've spent conservatively about 320 hours over the past 8 months and I'm not done. Most of this was to make the plugin easier to install and more reliable -- attributes I doubt many will appreciate. But I digress. That is the topic for another post.

When you average this revenue over time and downloads it loses any luster it might have had.

I didn't start keeping detailed numbers on downloads until June 1, 2005 when I launched http://code.appnel.com/. In the first 8 months that Feeds.App was available for download I collected three licenses for a total of $125. This trend changed significantly once I launched that site and began to more aggressively sell the plugin revenues. This was perhaps the most positive experience thus far.

Even with this boost, the numbers look dismal over time. If you adjust the gross for June 1, 2005 to September 4, 2006 you get $2925. That averages to $193.71 a month (30 days). To put that into perspective, this figure represents less then 2 hours of consulting for me.

Since code.appnel.com launched, Feeds.App has been downloaded 4680 times. That equates to about $0.63 per download. That's about double of what I recall MT was reported to be pulling down before they introduced the new licensing and got blasted out of the sky. (See my O'Reilly weblog post Movable Type 3.0 and Eating for more.) It's worth noting that the reported MT figure was based on a numer of releases where Feeds.App has only seen one major release.

I recently said on the Six Apart's ProNet (Professional Network) mailing list that plugin development was slightly more lucrative then sweat shop labor. Few knew that I wasn't joking.

Feeds.App Lite has been my biggest push to market Feeds.App. The idea was that by putting a basic version of my software in front of users a certain number will discover the commercial version and upgrade. For the sake of disclosure Feeds.App Lite was licensed to Six Apart for a $1000 flat fee. Little is actually shared by the two other then the widget maker and some of the template tag names.

Since Feeds.App Lite was introduced in MT 3.3 Beta 3, downloads of Feed.App are down from an average of 11.05 a day to 6.45. Prior to Feeds.App Lite's debut, Feeds.App gross per month (30 days) was $208.12. Post Lite debut it's down to $147.89.

One way of looking at these numbers is that Lite provided the functionality a significant number of users were looking to Feeds.App for. Another is that Feeds.App 3 has not shipped and users are waiting for its official release and its premature to read anything into these numbers long term. Both are likely contributing to this trend, though I suspect its probably more the former than the latter. Either way this is not what I nor Six Apart had hoped for. Such is life in business though.

The numbers for Tags.App are worse.

Initially I tried a different approach with Tags.App by pricing it for the "premium" market and did not make it available for download. My reasoning was that the plugin required some care to install and run which made it more suited for advanced implementations. Besides, it was better to have 1 customer paying $1000 then 200 paying $50 because the sales and support costs are lower. I had a couple of sales in the pipeline, but ultimately had to abandon that approach when word started to circulate that Six Apart was going to introduce tagging into MT. The premium approach no longer seemed viable so around October 15th of last year, the plugin was made available for download and prices where dropped to the level they are today.

Gross revenue for Tags.App to date has been $925. It's been downloaded 890 times to date (September 4, 2006). This download number does not include the preview release of Tags.App that I put out right before the end of the year. (That release never went into code.appnel.com because I suspended development to see what Six Apart would produce in MT.) Using these numbers, that works out to be just over three downloads a day and $86.99/30 days. The numbers post MT 3.31 have simply flatlined -- 1.26 downloads a day and $0 revenue.

I've said there is a road forward for Tags.App, but these numbers certainly support giving up on it entirely. (I'm not though. I'm a bit stuborn and perhaps too proud to toss out everything I learned doing that plugin.)

Based on all of these revenue figures I'm left wondering if there really is a viable commercial plugin market for MT.

I readily admit that there is more I could have done better or different that would have improved these numbers -- better documentation, easier to install, faster releases, better features and so on. Feeds.App may not be the best case study in that syndication is really quite difficult to make easy. As I've also mentioned, passing judgement on these trends may be a bit premature.

Still I really question if any or all of these would have had a significant enough effect to make plugins like Feeds.App a viable business opportunity.

In trying to figure out why the theory does not match the reality I've come up with some scenarios that may be playing some part.

An insignificant number of users overall want the features being introduced as plugins. Like the audience for Snakes on a Plane, there is only a small but extremely vocal minority skewing perception.
Users do not want to pay for these features -- they want them "free" which essentially means Six Apart bundling them in MT. Some of this view is supported by the impact Feeds.App Lite had on its commercial sibling. It's also based on discussions on the ProNet mailing list.
Users do not trust third party plugins and want Six Apart's support and approval before "buying." This view also has surfaced a few times in the course of conversation with clients and on ProNet. Users says "can MT do X?" Six Apart/Me says "Yes, there is a plugin that does that." User says "I don't want a plugin, I want it in MT." This reoccuring conversations would also support the previous point.
Users are unaware that these plugins exist and that MT can be extended to do X. Here is an interesting bit I haven't disclosed thus far. To my surprise MT-Plus, my better search engine plugin that placed in the Plugin Developer's Contest, is my second most downloaded plugin after Feeds.App. What makes this more surprising is that MT-Plus has not been updated since its release two years ago and has been terribly neglected by yours truly. This raises the possiblity that Six Apart's promotion plays a significant part.

I'm short on answers, but I suspect all of them play a part. To what degree and if there are others is unclear.

So what do you think? What needs to change in order for there to be a viable commercial plugin market or is it a theoretically fantasy? What needs to change? I'd really appreciate knowing.

Announcing Movable Type JumpStart

2006-08-17T17:46:59Z

We're pleased to announce the launch of Movable Type JumpStart, our turnkey bundle of consulting and training that gets you started blogging quickly for a fixed fee.

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For more information see the Movable Type JumpStart program page on our site or contact us.