Flash CMS

I would thoroughly recommend sticking to xml, is it for your own site or for a client? :)
 
At the moment, no one! haha

It just came to mind as I was thinking about it the other day. I do have a client coming up soon that I may need to use it for. But I think he has basic knowledge of Photoshop and I'm sure he is smart enough to edit text into the right place(xml document).

I would like to try out using a fcms. But the price is a lot to 'try'!
 
You can create a CMS in flash quite easily but I am not sure about doing it "on its own". One option might be to use a second layer underneth like PHP to do most of the functionality.

You could have a flash user interface but use XML to pass data between the interface and an underlying PHP scripts layer that does all the database connectivity and other functional processing.

i.e. call a php script to get the last 10 blog entries (think of an RSS feed) or post another new blog entry either directly or over HTTP with GET variables.
 
What I think I would predominantly be using it for would be updating images and correlating text. You can control the size of the dynamic text box via actionscript. But I haven't found out how to control the size of the images. The only way I have found is sizing the images to an agreed size and then calling them in via xml.

I have never (consciously) used PHP!
 
I would not focus on controlling the size of the images client-side. When I code anything "admin" or "cms" that includes an image I usually handle the rest server side.

All these websites you see with a huge collection of products didnt require the admin user to size the product images right before uploading them to the website. If it did m it would be very badly coded.

To accomplish what you need the only question I had was: How does flash upload files to a server? and on my first search in google the first link was this;

Upload with Flash 8

:) great!

In reading this bit;

Flash can't upload the file by itself, and instead needs a back-end language to do the server side job.
It sort-of confirmed my theory about needing another layer, so I went on to click the "continue reading" link... if you go to page two (skipping the flash stuff) you can see that they use 2 simple lines of PHP to handle moving this image;

move_uploaded_file($_FILES['Filedata']['tmp_name'], "./files/".$_FILES['Filedata']['name']);
chmod("./files/".$_FILES['Filedata']['name'], 0777);

and line 2 is not even needed! you literally need the one line (as well as the flash code of course).


So to extend this, all you would need to do is write a little PHP that copies this file to as many directories as you need sizes of the image, while resizing and scaling on the fly.


ie. if you had

/images/uploaded/
/images/thumbs/
/images/blog/


you could (psudeo code)


move_uploaded_file(params here, "http://www.designforums.co.uk/images/uploaded/") // this moves it to the main "uploaded" directory.


then have more code that copies this to the other two directories in whatever scale/target size you specify.

copy from "uploaded" to thumbs, target scale 100 * 100;

copy from "uploaded" to blog, target scale 200 * 200
 
Thanks for the insight! Unfortunately i am pretty ignorant with html/ css/ php! But when I have some time I will sit down and force myself to learn!
 
I would stick to something like Wordpress if you want a CMS, don't bother with a flash based CMS.
 
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