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

About the Author

Travis Tidwell is the founder and CTO for TMT Digital (http://www.tmtdigital.com), a company that specializes in the development of Flash applications for the Drupal Content Management System. He is also the sole developer for the Dash Media Player (http://www.tmtdigital.com/project/dash_player, http://www.drupal.org/project/dashplayer), which is a media player built specifically for Drupal. As well as contributing to this media player, Travis is also the author and co-maintainer for the FlashVideo module (http://www.drupal.org/project/flashvideo), which is a complete video solution for Drupal.

Travis graduated with a degree of Bachelors of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Oklahoma State University and has worked as an Embedded Systems Engineer for companies specializing in automotive and agricultural GPS products. Travis then fell in love with web development and more specifically with Drupal and Flash, where he has developed numerous sites including http://www.delicioso.com for Food Networks, Ingrid Hoffmann.

In his spare time (which is rare these days), Travis enjoys the performing arts where he sings, plays the guitar, and even tap dances (go to http://www.youtube.com and search for "Soul Man Tap" to see him in action).

Travis currently lives in Des Moines, IA with his beautiful wife Erin, and is the proud parent of a feisty one-year-old named Brycen.