Book Image

Joomla! with Flash

Book Image

Joomla! with Flash

Overview of this book

You can build any kind of web site using Joomla! The look and feel of Joomla! web sites can largely be customized using the many templates, components, modules and plug-ins available. With all these features, ease of administration, and options for customization, sometimes you may think of integrating other technologies such as Flash with it. This is because Flash provides great animation features that are otherwise not available in Joomla! This book shows how to integrate Flash into Joomla! You will learn how to add the various functionalities provided by Flash and make your site stunning, visually rich, and interactive. The book covers topics like flash headers, menus, displaying and maintaining flash movies, slide shows, animation, interactivity, and more. Installation and use of Joomla! modules like Flash, Joomla Random Flash, Active, and Handy SWF Flash module are covered too. The book introduces Joomla! and Flash and briefly shows the benefits of using Flash in Joomla!. It shows you how to add Flash objects in Joomla! articles and modules, build Flash-based menus, create Flash-based photo galleries, interactive maps, and charts. It also shows you how to display content in custom fonts, create a streaming media site, customize the Joomla! template to display Flash logos, headers and banners, and use Joomla! content in Flash objects. Finally the book covers troubleshooting Joomla! and its extensions. At the end of the book an appendix lists resources on Joomla!, Flash, and related extensions, to help you find more information.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Joomla! with Flash
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface

Adding Flash in templates


If you are familiar with Joomla! templates, then you will understand that there are two ways to display Flash in a template:

  • By hardcoded embedding of Flash items

  • By dynamically loading Flash objects at module positions

We have seen many modules that can display Flash objects. Therefore, in this section, we will be looking into the embedding of Flash objects within templates. It will also be helpful if we understand the structure of Joomla! templates.

Generally templates for Joomla! include headers in Flash. Flash animations are included in the header area of a Joomla! template. Some templates include the mechanism to show images from a specific directory. For example, the template shown in the following screenshot, available for download at http://joomlatp.com/joomla-1.5-templates/Templates-has-flash-header.html, is designed to show a Flash header comprised of the images kept in a directory:

The following sections briefly describe the structure of a Joomla! template...