Build dynamic, content-rich Flash CS3 and CS4 applications for Drupal 6

* Learn to integrate Flash applications with Drupal CMS
* Explore a new approach where Flash and HTML components are intermixed to provide a hybrid Flash-Drupal architecture
* Build a custom audio and video player in Flash and link it to Drupal
* Build a Flash driven 5-star voting system for Drupal at the end of the book

In Detail

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.

What you will learn from this book?

* Understand how Flash and Drupal communicate
* Embed Flash applications within Drupal and also learn about the important modules that make it easier to work with Flash in Drupal
* Learn the asynchronous programming techniques for Drupal's web services
* Set up Drupal for web services using the services module to handle external interaction
* Create a custom recipe content type for your Flash application and add new fields and images to it
* Use Drupal's imageCache module with Flash to ensure that the images are not too large when loaded into our application
* Create an audio-handling class using ActionScript 3
* Load and play audio in Flash, and add user controls like on and off
* Utilize Object Oriented techniques in ActionScript 3 to build a common MediaPlayer class to be used for both audio and video applications
* Create a playlist of video nodes for our custom media player using Drupal Views
* Utilize user management within a Flash application to manage its users and protect the content of the site with a permission-based role system
* Add content to the Drupal web site and also keep it safe from malicious software
* Build a custom voting service and create a Flash-driven 5-star voter for Drupal using the popular FiveStar module

Approach

This book takes a step-by-step approach to building Flash applications for use with the Drupal Content Management System. In each chapter, you walk through the evolution of a real Flash application designed for Drupal. Every chapter builds on the previous one by presenting a more challenging feature for each additional chapter.

Who this book is written for?

This book is written for developers who wish to build dynamic flash applications. Although we will be using Drupal for our Content Management System, the lessons learned within this book can easily be applied to other content management systems such as Joomla or WordPress. Because of this, you are not assumed to be familiar with Drupal. Any interaction with Drupal will be described in full detail so that anyone can follow along. As for Flash, it is not necessary to be familiar with how to use Flash since that too will be covered within this book. However, it is recommended that you have some modest understanding of ActionScript and PHP since there are many code examples within this book.