Book Image

Flash with Drupal

Book Image

Flash with Drupal

Overview of this book

Due to its power and expandability, Drupal has become one of the most popular open source content management systems. At the same time, Flash has been adopted for its ability to create beautiful and dynamic web applications. By combining these technologies, you can create Flash applications that are both visually stunning and rich in content. This book is an in depth discussion and tutorial on how to integrate Flash applications with Drupal CMS. It will describe the best techniques and practices for integrating Flash technology with the power and flexibility of Drupal by building real-life Flash applications. Within this book, you will learn how to build Flash applications that show text from within Drupal and also present images, music, and video within a single Flash application. You will also be able to take advantage of the expandable fields and content filtering provided from the CCK and Views modules to add flexibility and power to your Flash applications. Finally, you will learn how to add your own custom functionality to Drupal and then utilize that from within your Flash applications leaving you with a world of possibilities. This book starts out with a simple introduction to Flash and Drupal technology where you will create a simple Flash application and then embed that within Drupal. From there, each subsequent chapter builds on the previous chapters tackling a new and challenging task. For each new task, you will take a step-by-step approach to building a real-life application that utilizes the feature introduced within that chapter. You will also explore alternative design approaches that will eliminate the current design challenges that developers face when building Flash-driven Drupal sites; and all this while staying true to the Object Oriented Principles that govern the foundation of the ActionScript 3 language. By the end of this book, you will be able to apply all the lessons learned from this book to any other use case you may encounter.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Flash with Drupal
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

User handling within Flash


In order to handle the current user, we will first need to open up the main.as file, where we will build the business logic behind the Flash objects we created in the previous section. Since each of these objects was given an instance name, they can now be referenced within our ActionScript code. Looking at the main.as file, our first task will be to instantiate our user login block by hiding the welcome movie clip.

// Hide the welcome message.
login.welcome.visible = false;
// Declare our Drupal connection
var drupal:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
drupal.objectEncoding = ObjectEncoding.AMF3;
// Connect to the Drupal gateway
drupal.connect( gateway );

Our next task is to show the correct login block depending on whether the user is logged in or not. This can be determined from the user object passed to us after we connect to our Drupal system. If the user is defined and the user ID is not 0, then this means that we are logged in, and should show the welcome...