Introduction

What is Molly? Molly is many things... Molly is a web community, content management, and portal development system, architecture, and code library which provides several features to facilitate the development of an active community of users. These include live conversations and conferences ("chat rooms"), asynchronous structured conversations where participants need not all be online at the same time ("forums" or "Bulletin Boards"), calendars, news, comments, and many others.

At the heart of Molly is an XML parser which processes Molly Active Markup Language (MAML) tags embedded in XHTML pages. These tags allow you to create sophisticated dynamic database-backed web sites with no programming. MAML is an XML language designed to extend XHTML and can be freely mixed with XHTML. The Page Author's Guide will get you started writing MAML pages.

Molly is free and open source. Because Molly is open source you may extend and improve Molly and join a community of developers making Molly better and better every day. The Programmer's Guide will introduce you to Molly's architecture and code, and show you how to write modules to extend Molly.