With this community, Flux launches the first version of the Flux Developer Tools. This includes a number of important features for developers wishing to build community functionality using the Flux Platform. The focus is both on providing an advanced toolset for customization of Flux community sites, and also for providing extensive interoperability via easy integration points.

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. 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.

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 particular 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 is fully supported by FML. Check out a couple of examples below of FML usage.

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.

To learn more, check out the documentation, examples, and discussion boards on this site. We'll be rolling out improvements and additional functionality in the coming weeks so stay tuned.