The first version of the Flux Developer Tools has officially launched. The Developer Tools include a number of important features for developers wishing to build community functionality using the Flux Platform. The focus is on both providing an advanced toolset for customization of Flux community sites, and also for providing extensive interoperability via easy integration points. With this release, access to the core of the Flux Platform is being opened up to developers, and in the process this provides a whole new level of flexibility when using the platform.

Managing visual changes to your live site just got a whole lot easier. As a developer you can leverage two different environments for your Flux site - Preview and Live. This is a new approach to customizing the community which provides a safe “Preview” environment in which to develop all visual (CSS, mark-up) changes. Any changes made in Preview mode will not be seen by your users until you are ready to push them live. Once you are happy with the changes, simply use the tools provided to deploy these changes to your live site. Rollback functionality is also provided so any mistakes made during deployment of changes can be easily reversed. Additionally, we provide FTP access to upload all your static content (CSS, images, Flash etc) directly onto our preview servers. From there you can deploy your content onto our live servers with the click of a button.

The Flux Markup Language (FML) allows you to create highly customized community websites for your users. FML enables the Flux platform to be extended to meet your community’s custom needs. FML is a combination of standard HTML tags with additional proprietary Flux-specific tags added. The Flux-specific tags are used to access the social data and layer it into the community pages. Any web developer who is familiar with HTML can easily get started with FML without needing to have any understanding of the .NET framework upon which the site is built. FML currently allows all standard HTML tags to be used, and CSS inclusion and JavaScript are fully supported by FML.

We are committed to providing a highly interoperable platform. At the heart of this is the Flux Data Access API (DAAPI). The DAAPI provides a standardized Atom-based mechanism for retrieving all publicly available community data. DAAPI queries allow you to specify the exact data to be returned. For example, you can choose to retrieve the top ten most active members on your community, or the five most recently uploaded videos. FML uses the DAAPI exclusively to retrieve its data. The DAAPI can also be used outside of the community to integrate with external widgets.

The Flux Developer Community provides a place for developers to learn more about the Flux Platform ad how to use it, as well as interact with other developrs. The community offers full technical specifications on each part of this release. There are a lot of improvements and exciting new features coming shortly so make sure to check back for regular updates.

Tags: flux developer, flux documentation

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.