We occasionally get e-mails asking as to the progress of Ribcage, the WordPress plugin that runs the back end elements of this site. Progress has been slow, as we have been satisfied using raw MySQL backends to add releases. Yet I can finally show you some screenshots of the beta version of the software I am currently running on my home machine. Hopefully it will show you how easy this software is to use, as well getting some interest from other people who may want to use it in the future. It will, of course, be released under the GPL, open sourced. The intention is that using WordPress, which takes five minutes to install, then grabbing the plugin from the WordPress plugin repository (which anyone can now do within WordPress itself), you could have a working Creative Commons record label up within half an hour. This, we hope, will increase the ease to set up and therefore the numbers of Creative Commons labels across the internet.

Ribcage should be out in the new year to coincide with our two year anniversary, an event that will also be celebrated in a number of other interesting ways! We have a whole load of treats up our sleeves for you.

Photo courtesy of Feathered Tar at flickr.

Adding A Release

We keep all our releases updated on Musicbrainz, as it is the best database and source of discographies around. Ribcage allows you to lookup information about an album from Musicbrainz and bring it into your site.

Ribcage then runs off to Musicbrainz and looks up the release, then asks you if these details are correct. If it isn’t on Musicbrainz, then you have to fill in all these details manually. We are planning to make it possible to suck release data from Discogs.com and Last.fm, though this is a future addition. The idea is eventually you will enter the data once, either on an online database, or in Ribcage, then the data will be propagated throughout.

Then you have to check if the track data is correct.

After this, Ribcage adds the release to the database, and it will appear when the release date set arrives. The debug information shows the level of data actually added in three very simple steps.

You can also add a review of your release once that release is completed. This is almost complete, but not quite.

Artist Management

Adding an artist is even more simple than adding a release. Just fill in the following form.

Managing artists brings up a classic WordPress management table that you can see in the Edit posts form and elsewhere on a standard WordPress install.

Editing an artist is extremely simple. Note that we have automatic fields for website, Facebook and MySpace. We plan to add Twitter accounts into the mix when some of our artists get them!

You can, of course, delete artists as well.

Until Ribcage is released, Bandcamp seems to provide an alternative, though centrally hosted and not open source way of releasing your music, one which we experimented with for the release of To Leave A Mark. ROR artist Spiral Jacobs is also on there. It is really rather good. You can give donations and this kind of stuff, as with Ribcage, and all manner kinds of fancy stuff like that and it is all done very cleanly. Great minds and all that…

It is also the first release we have put out on Bittorrent as MP3, FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. If you are into such things, give the links a click and download this way – the more that do, the faster it becomes for everyone to do so, provided you keep seeding. Fire up those torrent clients immediately!

And we’re pleased to confirm three more forthcoming releases too…

The Exploits of Elaine: 2003-2005
In their current incarnation, The Exploits of Elaine are an improvising collective making music that sounds a little like This Heat playing folk music from the planet Saturn. But prior to that, they made bloody awesome post-rock music. Their songs were direct, emotionally powerful and contained more ideas than most bands in that genre have across a whole career. This is a compilation containing tracks from their untitled 2003 EP and some unreleased material from 2005, including the mighty Laputa, which replace that bloody Sigur Ros song on every single nature/sports programme trailer.

Talk Less, Say More – ‘It’s About Time’
A companion album to the mighty “It’s About Time” EP released on RoR. Tolstoy, Greek tragedy and theories of the life, the universe and everything delivered in devastating rhymes with slickly impressive production and a knowing nod in the direction of pop.

Les Etoiles – To Leave A Mark
Another fine album of haunting confessionals. The sparse beauty and devastating lyrical ability of ‘Never to Alight’ remains, but Mr Fitzpatrick has added lusher, richer instrumentation this time around. Another one for lonely nights.

Very soon!

We’ve just taken delivery of our first professionally made release: Sweet Potato’s very very excellent album ‘Mash’. We’re doing it as a joint release with the lovely folks at Foetal Orange (run by Dom and Jack of Sweet Potato and Strap the Button) and expect it to be out within a week or two. The CDs have a four page liner booklet and are fully carbon neutral.

It’s an extraordinary record- quite unlike anything else we’ve heard. It’s somewhere between Ornette Coleman, Faith No More, Gentle Giant and post-Wyatt Soft Machine. Operatic vocals, free jazz wigouts, stonking riffs and curveballs aplenty.

One of the things we say in our manifesto is that anyone could do what we are doing. This post (below the fold) describes the technical nuts and bolts of how this site works so you can maybe do the same. In particular it describes the genesis of the software that runs this site – Ribcage. We get a fair bit of e-mail about it, which I am always very pleased to answer.

Myself and The Fabulous Mr Eric Lee are going to host the first annual ROR hackathon in January – the intention being twofold. First to expand Ribcage beyond its current parameters – to interface with Last.fm and Musicbrainz properly, to add details of gigs for our various artists, to allow users to be informed of updates more easily. Secondly and more vitally, it is also to make Ribcage a WordPress plugin that anyone can install and use. The implication is, we hope, obvious: anyone who can run a blog will be able to run a download label. With the new WordPress 2.7 allowing plugins to be installed direct from the repository without messing around with FTP and the like, this means that you could go from a standard blog to a label blog in less than five minutes – imagine the possibilities!

Photo by flickring.

So without further ado, lets start at the beginning.

Specifications and Shopping Around

Over coffee sitting outside Aldo’s bar in Panicale, myself and Jell trashed out a list of stuff the site should definitely do or be.

• Be unbelievably clear and simple to use from users perspective
• Allow releases to be downloaded
• Allow releases to be streamed so people can have a listen, with a Flash MP3 player
• Allow decent levels of logging for these things so artists know if they are popular or what releases are liked more than others
• Embrace Bittorrent to save on server load
• Interoperate with big music databases online, for example Musicbrainz and Last.fm, be gently Web 2.0
• Allow the artists some easy way to get the files they wanted to release to us, without using the post
• So degree of automation in spitting out all the different type of music files we would like to be avaliable
• Be easy enough on the backend for almost anyone with basic net skills to use
• Obviously have profiles of the artists and details of their releases
• Open Source, standards competent – given the nature of the project

After a good Google around, there seemed to be no free tools for managing a website for a record label. Sneaking around the sites of other small labels I strongly suspected that most relied on custom made and proprietary scripts cranked out by the site designers, or just done with static pages.

This at first seemed an opportunity to hack together a full blown web application for record label and to open source it for anyone to use. Not wanting to start entirely from scratch, and given the recent explosion in popularity of such things, I considered doing the site in a web application framework with full MVC attempting to be as DRY as humanly possible. I settled on the name Ribcage, coz it works with Records On Ribs, innit.

My first port of call was the ever popular Ruby On Rails – which also has the initials RoR. Setting it up on my Mac was a huge chore and when I got down to developing it seemed quite clunky and difficult, but perhaps I didn’t ‘get it’ or even try hard enough. I know other people rave about it, but it just didn’t capture my imagination.

Then I tried the new kid on the block Django. Django is absolutely amazing. Once you SQL database is configured, it automatically creates an administration interface for you, with security and everything, saving acres of precious time. A few lines in a file could create a whole complicated XHTML view of the data. Hacking together the whole database backend adding bit took an hour or so, with familarisation chucked in. Developing for it had an elegance to it that was very attractive indeed.

Both, however, required me to master a whole new language (Ruby and Python respectively) and handle numerous learning curve head aches. I’d have to program simple things, like a custom bit of full blog software. Although drop-ins existed (for example Mephisto for Ruby On Rails, whipping up a blog in Django takes minutes), I didn’t like them, maybe in part because I plain didn’t understand them. I knew PHP and could probably have a bash at Perl, but I don’t have the soul of a programmer. So I wanted something fairly easy, and not something that was overkill for what was going to be a relatively simple site. A full-stack application framework was probably overkill.

I’d been using WordPress for ages to create various websites and blogs. It had a wonderful combination of simplicity and power. It also has a very helpful Plugin API, is extremely well documented and has a very friendly development mailing list. If I developed a plugin for WordPress I would have a very good blog backend interface that was well known and proven, as well as access to hundreds of other plugins and themes to customise almost every detail of the site to being precisely the way I wanted. It also allowed us to write copy elsewhere on another WordPress install and import it into the live blog.

In a wider picture, WordPress also had a significant advantage of being almost ubiquitous in the blog world. Any person with the skill to get through a WordPress install could just drop in our plugin and have themselves a fully functioning record label website, something which was highly attractive considering our manifesto commitments. A WordPress plugin seemed to be very much in keeping with the whole idea of what ROR was trying to do: it was DIY and could be passed on. It seemed like the perfect choice. Most people could not handle setting up a complex web application, and many ISPs don’t provide the ability to do so cheaply even if they could – most people could handle WordPress and a plugin with little hassle.

Developing Ribcage

During the development Ribcage I was very much influenced by the concepts of Agile Web Development and in particular 37Signal‘s book Getting Real. Ribcage needed to do what it needed to do well, not be over cluttered with pointless features or overcomplicated with confusing bits. All stages of the software cycle needed to be parallel. We needed to add little features here and there as needs be and have them live on the site within hours (or minutes). We needed to be super flexible, like the best Web 2.0 stuff.

For learning WordPress I learnt loads from simply reading the source code of other plugins and obviously from the WordPress Codex and hook/action reference found there.

To type the code I used Textmate and it’s project management features. I set up a little development environment on my Mac using the built in web server in Mac OS X and installs of PHP and MySQL that allowed me to test code before it went online. Version control and all that jazz is done with Subversion. It allowed me to collaborate with other people who have added bits and pieces when I have got stuck.

The advantage of Subversion is huge. Make a minor change to Ribcage and I can just use svn update in my Dreamhost shell to update the site: no buggering around with FTP or getting my mitts dirty. And with the amount of minor changes, as well as stupid mistake, I made, this saved a hell of a lot of time.

What Ribcage Does

Ribcage pretty much does all the things we set out for it to do. It allows downloads. It spits out streams and information left, right and centre. It has pretty much everything front-end we need, whereas the back end and portability are severely lacking. So here are the goals ticked off we met:

• Be unbelievably clear and simple to use from users perspective
• Allow releases to be downloaded
• Allow releases to be streamed so people can have a listen, with a Flash MP3 player
• Allow decent levels of logging for these things so artists know if they are popular or what releases are liked more than others The wonderful Mint provides high levels of information about our site visitors more generally.
• Embrace Bittorrent to save on server load – In the end this I thought was overkill.
• Inter-operate with big music databases online, for example Musicbrainz and Last.fm, be gently Web 2.0 - this is partially done, our January hacking will hopefully sort this out.
  
• Allow the artists some easy way to get the files they wanted to release to us, without using the post We did this in a slightly different way.
  
• So degree of automation in spitting out all the different type of music files we would like to be avaliable Ditto.
• Be easy enough on the backend for almost anyone with basic net skills to use The back end is fairly ropey but it works well enough. This will be improved in the push for a public version.
  
• Obviously have profiles of the artists and details of their releases
• Open Source, standards competent – given the nature of the project

Conclusion

I hope this short explanation might serve to give others ideas about how to develop your own small scale project as well as wheting your appetite for Ribcage’s forth-coming release.