designguide building
Status of this Guide: This guide is being updated to show designers how to accomplish the same tasks, but by using the theme infrastructure. What this guide shows designers is how to build a website from scratch using nothing but the built-in Melody Template editor.
Welcome to "Building Websites with Melody," a definitive guide for designers and developers on how to take a blank canvas and create within it a robust, powerful, feature rich community oriented website. This guide is divided into three major sections, corresponding to and progressing roughly in accordance to the familiarity you will slowly build with the Melody Publishing Platform. They are:
- Laying the Groundwork - This section of the guide will help you become familiar with the fundamentals of blogging, the basics of Melody, and its template language. At the end of this section you will have created a basic website and a blog, complete with threaded comments, feeds, and navigation. You will also have become familiar with the basics of Melody's template language.
- Extending Your Website - With a solid foundation having been established, thanks to "Laying the Groundwork," this section will instruct you on a number of features you can elect to add to your website. This section includes such topics as adding "Digg This" buttons, comment feeds, advertising, related entries and much more.
- Advanced Topics - In the final section, we will explore features that make use of Javascript and some of Melody's more powerful features like multi-blog aggregation.
Laying the Groundwork - Still under development
- Introduction and Overview
- Building Your First Website and Blog
- Adding an About Page to Your Website
- Simplifying Your Website Using Template Modules
- Building Navigation Menus
- Creating a Custom Login Form
Extending Your Website - To be developed
Advanced Topics - To be developed
This guide has content valuable to every Melody user. However, this guide was designed for users, freelance designers and consultants looking to familiarize themselves with the Melody platform. This guide begins with the assumption that you know very little about Melody, or its companion product Movable Type, and through a logical sequence of tutorials it aims to expand the reader's ability and confidence in their building websites, blogs and social networks with Melody.
In order to use this guide properly however, we must make a few basic assumptions:
- You have successfully installed Melody.
- You understand the basics of HTML and CSS.
- You can work with or at least read Javascript.
It is the goal of this guide to not only instruct you on how to build websites with Melody, but also to produce a well designed website in the process that you would be proud to use yourself.
As a result some of the code samples we will discuss contain large amounts of HTML and Melody template tags. To make our samples clearer you may sometimes notice discrepancies between the large code samples we provide for you to cut and paste into Melody, and the excerpts from those code samples we use as a basis for dissection and discussion. These differences often come in the form of an abbreviation in some way, such as in lacking the complete HTML you may find in the full example. Our hope is that this will make it easier for us to more easily highlight the most important concepts to learn in any given section.
Category: Guide
Tags: design guide, table of contents
Questions, comments, can't find something? Let us know at our community outpost on Get Satisfaction.
- Author: Byrne Reese
- Edited by: Violet Bliss Dietz