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

Developing Flash content using J-AMFPHP


The AMFPHP libraries used for Flash Remoting in PHP are now made available for use with Joomla! 1.5 by Anthony McLin with the name J-AMFPHP. The package comes as a component and is freely available for download at http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/jamfphp/frs. From this location, you can download three files: J-AMFPHPCoreComponentv0.3.2.zip, J-AFMPHPAuthenticaionService.zip, and J-AMFPHPExampleServicesPlugin.zip. You can install these from the Extensions | Install/Uninstall screen of the Joomla! administration area. Once installed, you will get a folder tree, as shown in the following screenshot:

We are looking into this directory structure as it will be useful for starting the service browser.

One of the limitations of J-AMFPHP is that it lacks documentation. You cannot start using it straight after installing the component and plugins. You need some tweaking and those tweaks are really tricky to find out.

Configuring J-AMFPHP

First of all, you need...