We've been making steady progress on several Meld products since the last update, with a lot of work being performed on the core framework pieces.
Several of the Meld Solutions team members, including myself, will be at CFUnited this year. We hope to show off a few of our applications there, and will be more than happy to answer any questions you might have. As to whether or not we'll have something ready for you to download and try out ... lets just say "we're working on it".
Meld Ecommerce
We're at the stage now where we are building 'base' products, and are beginning to integrate the forms built with the Meld FormBuilder tool to act the 'template builder' for product types. In early tests our development team has demonstrated it is possible to create very sophisticated, multi-choice product templates very easily and very quickly.
We're also beginning to integrate the first parts of our event-driven plugin extensibility. We'll blog more on that later, but essentially it will be possible to write Ecommerce extensions and display objects without ever having to alter the base Meld Ecommerce application.
Meld Cart
This is both a base component of Meld Ecommerce and a stand-alone application on its own. Based upon our experiences with building the custom Ecommerce application for MeldForums.com, Meld Cart is able to 'accept' products via Mura events and process them independently or along side regular Meld Ecommerce products. For instance, you could easily add event registrations, products from other Ecommerce applications, or one-off products to your Meld Cart, have it process the payment, then notify you via a Mura event that the product has been 'purchased'. The concept is really easy to implement and has tons of practical applications.
The Meld Cart will also use the Meld FormBuilder to create a custom checkout experience. With FormBuilder you will be able to create a single- or multi-page checkout process with any number of custom form fields. This would allow you to build a complicated, multi-step registration process, for instance, or even something as simple as adding a 'sign us up' or 'accept our terms & conditions' checkbox.
Meld Forums
MS SQL support for Meld Forums is nearly complete, with just the details of integrating the various search methods left to do. We have also made great progress in the Mura event-driven extensibility of Meld Forums. We are also building several example 'add-ins' such as a community points system to help demonstrate the power of extensions. Extensibility will mainly be on the front-end of the application for now, but will allow developers to add functionality to not only the general forum content, but to the user profile pages as well. For instance, you could build a custom extension to display the users recent posts, reply activity, or an internal messaging system.
Bits & Pieces
Easily the single largest 'utility' piece of our framework is the Meld FormBuilder. This is a GUI, drag-and-drop form builder that is designed for integration into all of our products. The first phase of the application, the actual form 'builder' interface, is now essentially complete and fully functional. There's a lot more testing and tweaking to do, but we are now able to create complex, multiple-field forms that can be integrated into the 'core' forms for Meld Ecommerce and Meld Cart. The 'choice' fields such as dropdown, radio, etc. are also working well with our Dataprovider utility which essentially supplies multi-column lists that can contain extra information such as price, weight or custom values.
We have also made steady progress on many of the other small utilities such as the category manager, permissions manager and gallery manger, all of which will be usable in our applications as well as any custom extensions developers might wish to create for Mura and Meld.
