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

Creating Flash objects


Adobe Flash was previously known as Macromedia Flash. Flash objects are created using Adobe Flash, a software program created by Macromedia and acquired by Adobe, Inc. The latest version of this software is Adobe Flash CS4.

Note

Nowadays, many applications can generate Flash objects. For example, there are converters that can generate a Flash animation from Microsoft PowerPoint. OpenOffice.org Impress can natively save a presentation as a Flash presentation. Therefore Flash objects are not only generated by Adobe Flash. However, for the sake of this book, we will assume that the animation and Flash objects we are talking about have been created using Adobe Flash.

By using Adobe Flash, we can create multiple types of Flash objects including animations and videos. The application generates the following types of Flash files:

Extension

Description

.fla

Files with this extension are Flash files that can be edited by the Adobe Flash application. This is not a compiled file and is not intended for embedding in to web pages.

.swf

These files are complete and compiled Flash files ready for embedding into web pages. SWF means ShockWave Flash, and this is the most, format for distributing animated vector graphics. SWF files can be generated using several products, such as Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, and SWiSH Max 2. There are several other small tools available for creating such animations.

.as

This is a script file generated by ActionScript. Although FLA files can contain scripts directly, for structural purposes separate script files are kept with the extension .as.

.flv

You may be using .flv files already on YouTube and other streaming video sites. FLV is a Flash Video file, ready for streaming with good compression. In fact, Flash video files are container files, which contain the videos and act as wrapper. The file itself is not a video format.

Flash video files play on most operating systems using Adobe Flash Player and other third party players including VLC Media player, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, and Media Player Classic. The file format itself is open, but the codecs for this format are proprietary, which makes this format dependent on Adobe Systems.

Note

Adobe Flash Player is available for free at http://www.adobe.com/products/Flashplayer/. It is required for playing any Flash object embedded in any website.