TypePad Developer Platform

Today blogging company Six Apart released their TypePad Developer Platform. It’s been covered on TechCrunch and on the TypePad blog, but the reason I’m writing is they’ve put GitHub front and center.

img http://img.skitch.com/20091001-t8njg88pt9jmj7qnshupcgwhx3.png http://developer.typepad.com

Six Apart VP of Services David Jacobs says the TypePad Developer Platform chose GitHub, “as the distribution point for our software, largely because of the social features and because we wanted a distributed group of developers to be able to keep up to date with our tools, and contribute back, very easily.”

The platform includes five open source libraries:

• A TypePad API client library for Python (docs)
• An object RESTational model (docs)
• A library for parallel HTTP requests through MIME multipart encoding (docs)
• A helper Django app for making TypePad applications (docs)
• and Motion – a Django app powered by the TypePad Developer Platform (docs)

All three projects use GitHub Pages and github-tools to publish their documentation, which is kinda cool.

(Side note: the helper app actually includes some JavaScript I wrote for Baconfile but never released.)

It’s great to see companies embracing open source and even better to see them use GitHub as a way to lower the barrier for contributors. Can’t wait to see how this turns out!