Book Image

Flash with Drupal

By : Travis Tidwell, Dries Buytaert
Book Image

Flash with Drupal

By: Travis Tidwell, Dries Buytaert

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

Building a Flash user login block


Our first task in this section will be to copy all of the Flash contents from the chapter2 folder, and then, copy all of the contents of that folder to a new folder called chapter10. We will rename the chapter2.fla project file to chapter10.fla. The reason we are starting with Chapter 2 is simply because any of the additional functionality that was added to the chapters following the second will be white noise to our real goal at hand, which is to create a user login system.

Once we have our new chapter directory, we will open up the chapter10.fla project file, where we will construct our user login. With this project open, we will start out by creating a new layer in our timeline that will be used for our user login block.

Once we have this layer selected, we can now construct our user login by first clicking on the tool, and then placing two Input Text fields on the top lefthand corner of our stage along with two static text fields that will be used as...