CMS Made Simple Forums

my reading tells me that flash can read xml, and that flash can receive parameters from the html source, so I got to thinking: it should be possible to use a menumanager template to build an xml file and then to provide that data to flash, thereby creating a dynamic flash menu.

I'm proficient enough in the CMS core, and in smarty, and menu manager to build the xml file... What I need is somebody to work with me to create a 'tutorial' and/or an 'example' on how to create (as I said above) a dynamic flash menu driven by cms made simple.

If any experienced flash/actionscript developer has the time, get in touch with me, and we'll see where we can go.  I think that this would be a very cool project that could be very useful for CMS developers.

What do you think?

or, maybe I should just dig into actionscript, because once you know that it's braindead simple?

It's not as hard as you think...

I've just done a huge project that spools through a 10MB yes MB! xml file and selects video and audio titles descriptions and file paths and presents them in an iTunes coverflow style menu, loading the images on the fly... I banged my head against a brick wall for days until I found this article

http://www.kirupa.com/net/reading_xml_directly_pg1.htm

Essentially you just need an xml editor say eclipse or similar to enable you to see the xml tree easily (so you can work out which nodes are parents etc)... then in flash you load the xml file into an array and spool through it looking for the content you require.

But for your example it's probably easier to query the cms database directly... that way you're not having to write a text file everytime you update the menu...

So in this case

I'd write a php script that calls the cms database gets the menu items and sends it back to the flash movie as a formatted xml file. You'll need to secure the script by only allowing access to it from the server's IP address or by querying the URI/HostName

Then call the script from within the flash movie assigning the result to an array which in turn populates the menu.

Actually sounds like fun : )

calguy1000 wrote: What do you think?

or, maybe I should just dig into actionscript, because once you know that it's braindead simple?

And load data from php?

Alby