Ok guys, the Limited Beta will be out on December 5th. We’ll be posting a signup form shortly, but we’ll accept only a small number of people. We need to clear some server side compatibility issues and squash the latest bugs. Hopefully, a public beta will be out for christmas!

In the meantime, due to the high amount of questions, you can read below some details about the mooflex client site.

mooflex?

Let’s start by saying that mooflex is built with m4m!, our custom MVC php framework, uses Smarty as a template engine and uses some of the great PEAR libraries. This is one of the main reasons why mooflex will be free for personal use, we thought that since we’re using some of the best opensource code out there, whe ought something back to the world.

Urls on steroids

With mooflex you’ll get customizable urls. This means you have the power to choose how will your urls look like.

mooflex has also smart search inside. If you type in the wrong url, mooflex will search for relevant articles containing the words you typed.

Powerful templating

With mooflex you have the complete and absolute control over your display: mooflex will never output a single html tag. You can even output xml with mooflex. Be happy, flash developers.

With Smarty, controlling your data will be as easy as drinking a cup of tea: your article title? it will be {$article.title}. Article Text? {$article.text}, and so on. It’s up to you where to put those.

You can also have componentized templates: be smart with smarty, and reuse your code. Include bits here and there, and you’ll never ever have to write the same thing twice.

Smarty Plugins

With mooflex and Smarty, it’s a matter of minutes to write a plugin. Write some php, return anything and you’re done. You can also take advantage of the m4m! framework to retrieve data from your database.

Smarty also has a number of existing plugins: Trim whitespaces, convert a string to uppercase, replace a string, linkify all the urls, convert markdown input, and many others. If this is not enough for you, we’ve written some custom smarty plugins, to help making your site cooler: an example would be the one that creates graphical headlines with a shadow (mad4milk.net).

Feed madness

As said in a previous entry, mooflex can output any feed you like, will it be RSS 0.91, RSS 1, RSS 2, ATOM, and OPML (thank FeedCreator for the various valid formats). Feeds for tags, feeds for tags in a section, feeds for comments in a specified article, feed for the lastest articles, feed for the latest comments, feed for all of the articles in a section, feed for everything, you can have all your site filled with feeds if you want to. As always, it’s up to you what feeds you want to include in your site.

Multiple interfaces

You can have something like “themes” with mooflex. There will be one default client interface, and you can build your own starting from it. Each theme can have css, html, javascript, flash, and anything you’ll need. The mooflex admin interface allows you to assign a template and a css style for each section. You can also choose a different detail template for section, if you want to. If this is not enough, you can use smarty conditionals (if/else) to choose what to include in each section. We make templating easy boys.