Develop

What is an Application?
Memberkit is designed to allow webmasters to create their own applications using visual tools. It is basically a web framework for non-programmers. For example, you can create an articles application to let your members post content on your site. Another example would be a picture album.

Elements of an Application

Each application may consist of these elements:

• Entry Form
• Update Form
• Listing Page
• Display Page
• Search Form
• Queries
• Events

Entry Form:
An entry form is a core part of your application. When you create an entry form, you are actually creating a database for user entries. All of the other application functionality will depend on these database fields. Memberkit has a very innovative drag and drop form builder that makes it painless to create entry forms.

Update Form:
Users may come back later and update their older entries. You do not have to create new forms to do this. Basically your entry form will be converted into an update form by Memberkit. However, if you would like to not include some of the questions in the update, you can do that as well from the form builder.

Listing Page:
Another important part of an application is the listing page. It enables you to show user entries to the other users. Memberkit has an easy to use, drag and drop visual listing designer. You can basically select one of the listing types, such as grid listing, and choose which database fields to be shown and publish your listing. For example, if you have a blog application, you can show a list of recent blog entries on a separate page.

Display Page:
You can show user entry details in their own standalone pages using Display designer. For example, a profile page is a display page for profiles application. Another example is the full article page on an article application. Memberkit also has drag and drop display page builder.

Search Form:
To let users search and browse other user entries for any application, you can create your own custom search forms. Search Form Builder also has a drag and drop user interface. For example, you can create a search form for members to browse other user profiles by any criteria.

Queries:
Query Builder is a tool to easily create entry listing pages for a specific criteria. For example, if you would like to show recently created profiles with pictures on your homepage, you can use query builder.

Events:
Sometimes you may want to do things differently depending on the conditions. For example, you may disable some member area pages for free users and enable them for paid premium users. In simple terms, events make it possible to control things on your site.

Managing Your Applications:

Exporting/Importing an Application:
You can create an application and then re-use it on another Memberkit based site. Export will pack everything related to an application (e.g. forms, listings and templates) into a single zip file. Then you can import this package back into any Memberkit installation.

Sharing an Application:
We hope that you will share your home grown applications. That's why we made it extremely easy to share an application in the Application Gallery. Memberkit users can simply click on an "install" button to import those applications to their own sites.

Backing Up an Application:
Backup basically exports an application with complete user entries. We recommend backing up your applications regularly. This is very useful when you are considering making major changes on your application. So that if things go wrong, you can simply delete the problematic application and import the backed up version.

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