Building the Back End of a Content Management System for Flash

1.  The HTML Form

We first need to create a form in HTML so that our client can simply enter the content they wish to change and hit submit without having to get into the database or the Flash source file.  Okay, sounds easy enough, right?

I do not intend to explain the HTML form, due to a lack of time and mainly because I felt that if you are not familiar with HTML, you may not really be able to comprehend the next part of this tutorial.  So I will have to assume that you, as the reader, have an understanding of HTML, and HTML forms specifically.  The simple form code is shown below, devoid of any formatting.  It is a basic form, with a heading label, a text area 40 columns wide by 10 rows high, two buttons (submit and reset), and the form action with the "post" method:

What it looks like:

In order to simplify our content management system, we will later place our HTML form directly into our PHP script, but we'll wait to do that when we put it all together. In practical use, I'd probably change the syntax to be XHTML compliant, and possibly add basic formatting, like tables or a cascading style sheet, or even image mapping for that particularly illiterate client.  In your own tinkering, you will of course want to add your own formatting.  But for the sake of argument, we'll  concentrate on each individual element in its most basic form for now.