Adobe is busy writing the new Version 3 of Adobe Business Catalyst and what's coming is revealed in a video presentation (below) made by Bogdan Ripa (left) at the Adobe Max Conference in October, 2011. He's the BC Director of Engineering who is leading the BC development team in Romania.

Two exciting ideas coming in Business Catalyst V3 are "Liquid Markup" that give the developer the power to control the design and logic when the server outputs a page, and "Site Import" which takes an existing website and automatically creates the design templates needed to convert it onto the Business Catalyst platform. Here's more...

Business Catalyst Liquid Markup

An exciting new feature coming in Business Catalyst V3 is "Liquid Markup" which give the web designer complete control over the way that products and catalogs in an online shopping cart are displayed on screen. Anything is possible, such as displaying products in one catalog in a completely different way than products in another. Liquid Markup also allows customizing in any way the shopping cart and checkout experience.

Summary: web designers are free to create anything, because Liquid Markup gives us more ability to control not only what the BC server outputs but also insert conditional programming processes to control decision making. This is a blessing, because often I run into clients who need a different product display or even a different shopping cart checkout experience for the different types of products being sold. In the past, BC limited you to one product display and one checkout process, but that limitation is now being erased.

Liquid Markup will extend to other parts of Business Catalyst, including web apps and blogs, giving the web developer tremendous power to quickly create powerful online applications or organize written information so web visitors can navigate it more easily.

Of course, with more power the web developer will need to do a bit more programming to create the Liquid Layout templates that customize the user experience. This process requires someone familiar with programming concepts and not just page design, because Liquid Layout enables the developer to control the program logic flow and the tables and table fields and variables running server side. It literally lets the developer create his own custom programming modules to run however needed. It also lets the developer blend in any jQuery or JavaScript logic with the BC output, resulting in cutting-edge websites that can have the fanciest features imaginable.

In the past I've sometimes not put a client in the Adobe Business Catalyst platform because I knew it had limitations that wouldn't meet the client's business needs. However, with Version 3 of Business Catalyst, those limits are now erased and I can build any kind of site needed. This truly makes Adobe Business Catalyst the best platform for almost any kind of website.

Another mind-boggling feature in Business Catalyst Version 3 is the ability to take an existing website on another server, and automatically import the site into Business Catalyst not only creating all the web pages but also the design templates needed to render those pages. In that past, BC could bring in pages, but then the developer had to spend a couple days creating site-wide templates to render the common parts of those pages (header, footer, sidebar columns, etc.) and then manually convert all the existing pages to use those templates. Now instead of spending days, you click a button and the templates are created for you on the server in minutes! I can migrate more clients existing sites into BC quicker and they don't have to pay me for my time to do it. Another reason to prefer Business Catalyst as your favorite web development platform.

Business Catalyst Version 3 Video Sneak Preview