Little more than 5 years ago, domain name servers around the globe were
notified about a new site: musescore.org. The goal was to create a home for
the small but vibrant group of MuseScore users and contributors, and
facilitate collaboration among them. You can read the early communication
about this milestone event,  buried somewhere deep in this mailing list
<http://dev-list.musescore.org/New-MuseScore-website-have-a-look-and-give-feedback-td685557.html>
 
. 

During its first couple of years, musescore.org expanded, with translations
in more than 30 languages and forums in more than 15 languages, with a
collaboratively written  handbook <http://musescore.org/en/handbook>  , a
dedicated  issue tracker <http://musescore.org/en/project/issues/musescore> 
, numerous  plugins <http://musescore.org/en/plugins>  , a faceted search
engine, a  translation server <http://translate.musescore.org>   and many
more things under the hood. The MuseScore community flourished. 

But it wasn't all sunshine. As success came, so came the growing pains.
There were moments, that it was hard to keep the site up and running on the
limited hardware. And every time we were forced to move over to new and
better hardware, it came with a period of learning how to stabilise the
site. I remember in particular the moments when the site was hammered by
crawlers from Asian based search engine, which did not respect the time
interval between crawl requests. For about a month we struggled to find a
good solution, but eventually  Varnish <https://www.varnish-cache.org/>  
came to the rescue. Another drawback of success was the arrival of spammers
on the MuseScore forums. A fight which has not stopped until this very day,
further draining time and resources away from our core business: making
great notation software.

To make great notation software, we need the right tools. Over the years we
added new tools and infrastructure to facilitate our development. Not so
long ago we moved from  Subversion to Git
<http://dev-list.musescore.org/Migrate-MuseScore-SVN-trunk-to-Git-Please-read-td7266219.html>
 
, which has proven to be a very good decision in retrospect. Today, the 
MuseScore development infrastructure
<http://musescore.org/en/developers-handbook/references/development-infrastructure>
  
features a complete continuous integration solution which looks as followed:

<http://dev-list.musescore.org/file/n7578349/Development%2520infrastructure.png>
 

Soon we will be extending this infrastructure schema with  continuous
localisation
<http://support.transifex.com/customer/portal/articles/1168202-what-is-continuous-localization>
 
. This which will facilitate the translation of the next major MuseScore
release in a much faster and collaborative way. To make this happen, we will
phase out the current  translation server <http://translate.musescore.org>  
and migrate to a hosted solution at  Transifex <http://transifex.com>  .

Going back again into the archives of this mailing list, I'd like to dig up
a milestone post for the MuseScore project:  The State of MuseScore
<http://dev-list.musescore.org/The-state-of-MuseScore-td5771158.html>  .
With that post we introduced the creation of  MuseScore.com
<http://musescore.com>  , a sister website to MuseScore.org. Today, this
site has surpassed musescore.org in terms of traffic and data with a
multitude. We envisioned a way to easily share sheet music, whether it's
with a few friends through  secret links
<http://blog.musescore.com/post/28400016284/sharing-private-sheet-music-with-a-secret-link>
 
, through private or public  groups <http://musescore.com/groups>   or why
not simply embedded in your  facebook profile
<http://blog.musescore.com/post/11861196797/sharing-sheet-music-on-facebook> 
. Clearly MuseScore users like it as the available  sheet music
<http://musescore.com/sheetmusic>   is growing daily. There is much more to
say about the features this site offers, but that's a topic for another
update.

While we envisioned the two websites (musescore.org and musescore.com) to
happily live next to each other, it did introduce quite some confusion among
new MuseScore users. They didn't have the historical background on how the
two sites came to existence and which purposed both served. For most of our
new users today, MuseScore is a sheet music sharing community but many don't
know about the notation software. It also happens the other way around of
course, where users only knew about the software. From a communication point
of view, MuseScore severely lacked one clear single message.

So today we are rolling out on unified site design for both musescore.org
and musescore.com. Both will share the same site header, so they nicely
cross link to each other. Also the login system will be unified, by phasing
out the standalone log in system on musescore.org. Instead, you will be
logging in now with one username and one password. This will certainly cause
some confusion, so if you are stuck somewhere, please  reach out to us
<http://musescore.com/contact>  .

This is just the first step in a complete redesign of MuseScore. Another
ongoing effort is to redesign the MuseScore notation software which will
result in much more modern and professionally looking software. The result
of that will be unleashed with the release of the next major MuseScore
release, i.e. version 2.0. To anticipate that release, we shall start
updating the online handbook featuring new functionality in MuseScore, as
well as describing what has changed. All of that with new screenshots
showing off the new clean design of the software. It is also our wish and
hope that one or more people within the MuseScore community are willing to
make new video tutorials, which can replace the  MuseScore in 10 easy steps
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mh6m2mbVHs>   series.

I invite you to come and talk to us (thomasbonte / lasconic) about all this
on IRC #musescore on freenode.net, or simply by replying this email. Thanks
for reading!



--
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