February 26th 2009 - Entry Posted to: AMFPHP, ActionScript 3, Zend AMF

For a project I have in development I needed to once again create or connect to a CMS.

I’ve previously rolled my own CMS using AMFPHP, which works fine. However, I thought I’d give using Wordpress a go as a CMS system for Flash sites, with an AMFPHP connection between Flash and the wordpress database.

I stumbled on Amfphp WordPress Integration (AWI) which seemed to offer what I was after. However, it has not been updated for a long time, and supports wordpress 2.3 or so and below. The project I have on needs to take advantage of wordpress’s tagging and categorising of content, which was the main element missing from the awi project. So, I re wrote it, and added in many more methods and dropped many of the existing ones.

You can view an example of it at work here: http://www.noponies.com/dev/cloud/ Which is using a hacked version of the WP-Cumulus Wordpress plugin, from here: http://www.roytanck.com/tag-cloud/. Instead of using a PHP method to create XML, I’m just using AMFPHP to call a getTagCloud method, and using the data in a similar fashion to how the WP-Cumulus Flash file works. Clicking on either a category (white text) or a tag (grey text) calls another method that pulls the various posts that are filed under that particular category or tag. Pretty simple stuff.

Ironically after embarking on this little project, I found a few other similar ones, this one (Flexpress) here by Jonnie Spratley which can be found here http://jonniespratley.com/blueprints/ and this swc library FlexDb from here: http://ghalex.com/blog/?p=53. Always annoying to re invent the wheel.

I’ve called my project, FlashPress, which is who I intended it to target (Flash devs) or people like me.

As of version 0.2 this also works fine with Zend AMF, and I’ll update the source file with some demos of connecting using Zend AMF.

Anyway, enough rambling, you can download the latest version (0.6) here;

Source Files Version 0.6
Flash Press 0.6 (173)

Let me know if there are bugs etc. I’m not really a PHP guy, nor a MYSQL guy, so I’m definitely interested in hearing about ways to improve things.

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February 20th 2009 - Entry Posted to: ActionScript 3

This is really just an experiment that I have ended up not using at all.

I had a project where I had to come up with some interface for changing the order of items (gallery items in a CMS) so I thought I could simply layout a grid representation of the gallery items and let the user drag them around to re arrange them.

The result is below;

It’s not perfect by any means, but might be of use for someone. In the end I added drag and drop functionality to the NpScrollingPanel class as a means to re order content.

Source Files
Here is the relevant source file; Drag Sort Grid (1035) - 42.29 KB

The orginal file came from the excellent soulwire (JUSTIN WINDLE) at this url; http://blog.soulwire.co.uk/art/dynamic-stacking/

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