Flash with Drupal

石头

作者：Travis Tidwell Tidwell
出版日期：May 27, 2009
出版社：其它
页数：380
ISBN：ISBN-10: 1847197582 ISBN-13: 978-1847197580
文件格式：PDF


Product Description
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 themost popular open source content management systems. At the same time,Flash has been adopted for its ability to create beautiful and dynamicweb applications. By combining these technologies, you can create Flashapplications that are both visually stunning and rich in content.
This book is an in depth discussion and tutorial on how to integrateFlash applications with Drupal CMS. It will describe the besttechniques and practices for integrating Flash technology with thepower and flexibility of Drupal by building real-life Flashapplications.
Within this book, you will learn how to build Flash applicationsthat show text from within Drupal and also present images, music, andvideo within a single Flash application. You will also be able to takeadvantage of the expandable fields and content filtering provided fromthe CCK and Views modules to add flexibility and power to your Flashapplications. Finally, you will learn how to add your own customfunctionality to Drupal and then utilize that from within your Flashapplications leaving you with a world of possibilities.
This book starts out with a simple introduction to Flash and Drupaltechnology where you will create a simple Flash application and thenembed that within Drupal. From there, each subsequent chapter builds onthe previous chapters tackling a new and challenging task.
For each new task, you will take a step-by-step approach to buildinga real-life application that utilizes the feature introduced withinthat chapter. You will also explore alternative design approaches thatwill eliminate the current design challenges that developers face whenbuilding Flash-driven Drupal sites; and all this while staying true tothe Object Oriented Principles that govern the foundation of theActionScript 3 language. By the end of this book, you will be able toapply all the lessons learned from this book to any other use case youmay encounter.
What you will learn from this book?

• Understand how Flash and Drupal communicate
• Embed Flash applications within Drupal and also learn about theimportant 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 acommon MediaPlayer class to be used for both audio and videoapplications
• Create a playlist of video nodes for our custom media player using Drupal Views
• Utilize user management within a Flash application to manage itsusers and protect the content of the site with a permission-based rolesystem
• 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 Flashapplications for use with the Drupal Content Management System. In eachchapter, you walk through the evolution of a real Flash applicationdesigned for Drupal. Every chapter builds on the previous one bypresenting 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 flashapplications. Although we will be using Drupal for our ContentManagement System, the lessons learned within this book can easily beapplied to other content management systems such as Joomla orWordPress. Because of this, you are not assumed to be familiar withDrupal. Any interaction with Drupal will be described in full detail sothat anyone can follow along. As for Flash, it is not necessary to befamiliar with how to use Flash since that too will be covered withinthis book. However, it is recommended that you have some modestunderstanding of ActionScript and PHP since there are many codeexamples within this book.
About the Author
Travis Tidwell
Travis Tidwell is the founder and CTO for TMT Digital, a companythat specializes in the development of Flash applications for theDrupal content management system. He is also the sole developer for theDash Media Player, which is a media player built specifically forDrupal. As well as contributing this media player, Travis is also theauthor and co-maintainer for the FlashVideo module, which is a completevideo solution for Drupal.
Travis graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Electrical andComputer Engineering from Oklahoma State University and has worked asan Embedded Systems Engineer for companies specializing in automotiveand agricultural GPS products. Travis then fell in love with webdevelopment and more specifically with Drupal and Flash, where he hasdeveloped numerous sites including Delicioso.com for Food Network’sIngrid Hoffmann.
Travis is happily married to his beautiful wife, Erin, and is theproud parent of a feisty one-year-old named Brycen. When Travis isn’tworking on the computer (which is rare these days), he enjoys theperforming arts including playing guitar, singing, and tap dancing.

Jamesliu2009

65376698