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

Using Joomla! content in Flash


By now we know that the content of Joomla! is stored in databases. Whenever a user sends a request for an article to Joomla!, it retrieves the content of that article from the database. So far, we have seen how to use Flash objects in Joomla! contents, but we have yet not seen how to use the contents from Joomla! in a Flash object. Suppose, you have an existing site based on Flash, and now, you want to display Joomla! articles in that Flash site. In such a case, using dynamic contents in Flash is needed.

Using content from a database in Flash objects

Flash can read data from XML files. Therefore, the easiest way would be to extract the data from the database, convert it into an XML file, and iterate the XML file using a PHP script and feed it into Flash. Although it seems easy, another feature called Flash Remoting has been added to Flash, by which Flash objects can consume data from servers through a gateway service.

To consume the data from any web service...