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

Working with video in Drupal


Before we dive into Flash, we will first explore the process of implementing video into our Drupal web site. Much like audio and images, the Drupal contributors have introduced numerous modules for integrating video into our web site. Consequently, the process of finding the right solution for your needs can be somewhat confusing, since each one was developed to handle specific video requirements. In this section, we will briefly explore the different video solutions available for video integration, and then choose one that best fits our needs in this chapter. It is important to note, however, that the video solution we choose may not be the only or the best solution, but simply a solution that fits the bill for what we need to get done.

Although it is not an exhaustive list, following are four different video modules available for Drupal 6 at the time of writing this book. Each one of these modules was designed with a different use case in mind.

  • Embedded Media...