What We've Been Up To

I wanted to take a minute to update you on what we've been working on lately with Markup Factory.

We've been spending a lot of time improving our back-end, page rendering engine, templating engine, and our new MF Database module (currently in beta). This may not sound too exciting to some of you, but this groundwork will have a dramatic effect on what you will be able to create with Markup Factory.

Our main goal in all this is to make every aspect of the website design and presentation accessible to the designer. This includes full control of XHTML output for all of the content and data stored within the system.

Dynamic Snippets

One of the ways that we achieved this was to create a new feature called Dynamic Snippets. This feature is similar to regular Snippets, only you can now load a set of data into you snippet and loop through it to create customized output. For instance, you can create a new Dynamic Snippet called, "Latest News", set it to include any blog posts in a specific category, and then wrap the contents of the posts in HTML of your choosing. You can then insert this snippet into your home page or on a side bar in your template. The best part of all this is that you can do this without any programming, SQL statements, or database connections.

Database Module

We are also moving through the development of the amazing new Database Module. We've recently seen a number of sites launch using this feature in some creative ways ranging from a custom eCommerce site with customer order tracking, to a Real Estate listing site, to an online Membership Renewal application. The MF Database Module enables rapid development of simple web applications by enabling you to create a new dataset and then access that dataset through Dynamic Snippets or the Form Builder. We've also built integration with our user module, which enables you to associate data to users. Again, you can create these apps without any custom programming required.

These two features will be the cornerstone of our rapid application and website development toolbox.