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

Overview of a typical recipe web site


In this chapter our goal is to create a Flash widget that shows each recipe for a cooking web site. Since the structure of most recipe web sites is fairly consistent, I believe this example will easily illustrate how to create any form of custom content and display it within a Flash application. I am confident that after you read this chapter, you should be able to easily apply the lessons learned in this chapter to any type of custom implementation that your web site requires. So, let's take a moment to set up Drupal so that its data structure resembles that of a common recipe web site.

If you were to visit any popular recipe web site, you will most likely see a categorized listing of recipes ranging from cake to pot roast. When you click on one of these listings, you will see a new page that gives the information necessary to make that recipe. In Drupal terms, this recipe page is a single node that is categorized using a content type called Recipe.

Note...