Building the Front End of a Content Management System for Flash - Getting Started
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There is an open source Flash website builder, but its backbone is mostly ActionScript, and I honestly had trouble with being able to edit it to my purposes. Further, it used JavaScript for its back end instead of PHP and HTML. I didn't have time to create a site all over again just to fit it within the site template that comes with the website builder program. One of these days, I will tear apart its core code and try to make sense of it, but I needed a solution yesterday, not next week sometime. So I decided to rely solely upon my Flash design knowledge, and not the development side of it, and just utilize what I already had.
In this article, the front end will be the Flash website using dynamic text. The next article will discuss the back end, which will be a basic HTML form in which data is entered; the data is then processed through PHP and posted to a flat file database (or a simple text file), which in turn provides the content that the Flash website will display to the website visitor.
I want to look at this process in two parts. Part one will deal with Flash and dynamic text. Part two will talk about the HTML form, PHP, and a flat file database; then we will put it all together. The reason I want to discuss Flash and dynamic text first is that it's easier to visualize your process when you can see your end result as you are working. I love working with Flash because I usually get immediate gratification from my work; meaning I can see what I'm doing as I'm doing it. With PHP and HTML, it takes a bit longer to see the end result of your work, as it must be written and developed, then parsed in a browser. This makes sense, as Flash is client side code, and PHP and HTML are server side code. But this is only my sheer personal preference. Ultimately, it doesn't matter how you create it; the simple CMS can be created in these two processes and the two parts are molded together.
Once I have discussed the overall concept, and given you some code to work with, I am positive that you will come up with something much more sleek and intelligent than what I'm showing you. In fact, I have done just that myself. In that regard, I am merely helping to lay the foundation for you as a Flash designer and developer to give something to your client that will help them immensely, and you greatly later. By the end of this tutorial, you should have a browser-based CMS foundation into which your client can enter their data without ever having to learn HTML or Flash. Now, let's jump right in.
What you'll need:
Macromedia Flash MX 2004 or Flash 8
A text editor, like Notepad
A web server with PHP 4.0 or higher installed
Optional:
An HTML editor, like DreamWeaver or FrontPage
The Flash source code (flash_cms.zip) - 3 files, 4.91KB
The HTML-PHP source code (backend.zip) - 3 files, 1.85KB
Next: Dynamic Text in Flash >>
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