First of all since this is my first post, i want to send out a big respect for the developers of CMSmadeSimple, it's a really comprehensive and scaleable system with the usability intact, those elements are VERY hard to fine in other free CMS system, trust me
, this is also the reason i think it's important to make CMSmadeSmple usable for full flash based websites.I have been playing around with the CMS for a while now and drawn down a few potentials on how to use CMSmadeSimple as a CMS for flash websites, the main idea is to use the already made modules, pages, news system to use for flash and mainly just port the date to flash via XML. Only think it really takes is these few steps:
- php script that create a structured XML with data
- strategy on how the user should use the page function to create galleries, text/image content pages, media galleries (for this i've come up with a lot of nice and user friendly ideas)
That's all, but since im not a genius on PHP or Mysql i need someone to build the PHP script.
THE IDEA:
A long time ago i hacked wordpress to work as a CMS for flash, but sinde it's a blog system it' really was a impossible to make any use of the system in this sense, there i've been hunting a CMS with a high user friendly approach when it comes to creating/editing pages. I found it
.The idea is pretty simple, until now i've come up with 3 main editing ideas.
Pages, gallery, media gallery.
PAGES:
(test, html, images)
When the user want to create a new page in flash, they only have to create a normal page in the CMS, watch in the browser and then flash loads the hole html content into a dynamic textcomponent in flash which takes html tags (since not all tag are allowed some conversion must be done, a little work here).
I look at the mysql database i found that all the main content HTML is stored nice and clean in a table field, just to port to flash, this should be very easy.
GALLERY:
(images, text)
An easy way of going a gallery "flash module" would be to create a normal page, add a photo, write some text underneath, place a new photo, some text and so forth, then when porting to readable XML for flash, all the image links are sorted out of the html text and another xml entry holds the text that are between the two images so these two elements are "hold" together, very easy.
Then from flash you just have to pre load all photos and make a dynamic text field to past the html formatted text.
MEDIA GALLERY:
(videos, flv, text)
Again by using the standard pages in CMSmadeSimple you can easily create a video gallery, a page with linkt to x amount of videos you wish to see, you could even have a thumb if you desire.
The idea is to use the "add media" in tinyMCE and use quicktime as the embedder, then the user physical sees an element for the video, can write some text underneath and everything it ported to XML like in the image gallery (some calculation/sorting on the html code need to be done)
The nice idea of using the Quicktime objectembedmend on the page is, this one have a popup with a lot of setting posibilities like, name, width, height, id, loop, start, end, ect. These could again be used to send data into to flash to tell it how it should use the avi/flv file.
NEWS/ARTICLES:
This module should also be used since it's a very straightforward and nice feature as a news or blog element inside flash, AND this module opens up for user feedback send into the CMS system from flash without creating some extra odd PHP/sql trick.
OTHER FEATURES:
Telling flash what template to use is also very easy, in CMSmadeSimple just duplicate your standard template, call it something like "FlashGallery" and assign it to the Page where you hold all the photos for your gallery, then from within flash you look in the XML where the template type or name is portet to let flash know how to deal with the data and what page structure/build you want it to use.
Alot of other features like this could be portet over time, it's just up to the flash programmer to create a program to handle them correct.
So as you can see i've given it quite a bit of thought, just by using the elements that's already in CMSmadeSimple, without adding or changing anything but just thinking a little different, you could actually make CMSmadeSiple into a VERY powerfull CMS for flash.
XML:
The only thing we need is to convert the menu structure from the CMS into a structured and userfriendly XML output.
The best structure for this from a flash viewpoint is something like this.
... Here goes all the content from the page.
//// this structure can be repeated forever
... Here goes all the content from the page.
///// same as menuNode1
So the structure is basically the same as the menu structure, you can have a menunode that have a landing page to it, but also sub-pages connected to it.
Then within the the page data or news/article data is plotted, data within here will change according to the type of "template" you are using, therefor the firste node within the should tell flash what type of teplate this is and how the program should handle the data, else we just end up with some type or boring hardcode system.
Ideas on how to structure the Pages, Gallery, News and so on.
GALLERY
--------------------
PAGE
-------------------
Im not sure what is neede yet, therefor the 's, but one thing that need to be addressed here is the pageContent, either you would plot the html data directly into here within an CDDATA (after a safe html conversion for flash), or you could create a small PHP script and link to this telling it to fetch the html content data from the server and then output it as a text file, so flash would load this by its amazing command loadVars..
Anyway. These are y ideas on how to make CMSmadeSimple into a very comprehensive CMS for flash, it's very easy for a skilled PHP/mysql since you basically just need to plot the menu structure as an XML file and add content from all the pages, but it does demand an understanding for look up tables and mysql mastering.
So this is where i need all you skilled people out there, anyone interrested in helping on this project, ill try to make an example in flash an make a more detailed description of what neede to be ported from the CMS plus later on some tut's for Flash people on how to use this new amazing "hack"/feature.
Kind regards.
Mads ny larsen
www.madeofdots.com
.
