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

Showing CCK fields in Flash


We now shift our focus to Flash and pick up where we left off from the previous chapter. We will not only show the node title, but also show the CCK fields that we just created. We will start by first copying the chapter2 directory that we created in the previous chapter, and then paste our copy as chapter3. We will then rename the chapter2.fla project within this folder as chapter3.fla. Once we have our new project for this chapter, we can open it up, where we can modify it to include the new fields that we just created.

Building a Recipe widget in Flash

Now that we have our Chapter 3 project open, our first task will be to change the layout of Flash application so that there is room for the Description, Ingredients, and Instructions. We will start out by first increasing the size of our stage to 500 x 640. Once we have done this, we will need to resize our background so that it fits to the new stage. We will start this by first selecting the whole background...