Re: FN-FORUM: Flash and content management systems

date posted 14th August 2003 12:36

Chris Garrett wrote:

[Sorry, this is a re-posting because it seemed to fail last time...]

> Hi all,
>
> I am doing a proposal for a redevelopment of an existing flash based site to
> allow the client to update the content with a content management system. An
> added complication is it needs to be in english + four other languages at
> launch (french, italian, spanish and german), growing to more languages in
> future (including eastern european).
>
> Last time I did anything in this line the flash called a URL to get the
> values from name-value pairs returned from an asp script. Obviously things
> have moved on since flash 4 or whatever it was and now there are things like
> XML, remoting .. does generator even still exist?
>
> Right now the platform is classic asp and sql server 2000 but there are
> rumblings it may have to move over to JSP/PHP and mySQL at a future date.
>
> Any advice?

I wouldn't bother even thinking of Generator, MM made that redundant
with Flash 5 (unless you're thinking of using Flash 4 or earlier...)

The easiest way to localise an interface in Flash is to use a set of
static XML files to hold the translations. As these don't change
they'll be cached by the client browser for faster loading. I wouldn't
advise using a database to store the translations, as this would
increase the load on the servers unnecessarily.

If you're going to send data to a server, take a look at the LoadVars()
object. You can populate this as a container, to save you having to
send all Flash variables for the movie, or all variables for a
movieclip, to the server.

I tend to not to use the query sting format of data exchange anymore, as
it's a little cumbersome, and Flash is quite capable of handling and
parsing XML pretty quickly (as long as you're looking at XML files that
are < 2MB)

As for content management with Flash, you'll need to watch out for a few
"gotchas"

* Flash doesn't natively support file uploads (a complete pain in the arse!)
* Flash's HTML support is only HTML 1.0, but you've still got quite a
bit of control over the layout using the internatl
element
* the only image format that can be dynamically loaded is
non-progressive JPEG
* dynamically loaded MP3s are only supported up to a bitrate of 128kb

Obviously, if you've imported the images or audio into Flash and
exported them to separate .SWF files, then these last 2 limits are less
of a burden.

Another thing that I've come across, is when passing ids via the url to
Flash. If you're loading the movie using HTML, DON'T pass any query
variables within the movie or the "movie" attribute of the
[OBJECT] element. If you do this, each individual movie.swf?myid=xxx
will be cached separately. Use [param name="FLASHVARS"
value="myvars=1&myvar2=b" /] and the flashvars attribute of the [OBJECT]
element instead. The movie will be cached, but only the HTML changes.

Hope this is of some use.

Matt

--
Matt Burns [EMAIL REMOVED]
Freelance Web/New Media Consultant

Member of the Professional Contractors Group