CMS Made Simple Forums

How do I use a flash animation as an heading?

Preferably not, as flash seldom adds any real value for the user. But let's assume that yours will not be part of the flash plague: Just how you would normally put flash in a page? If it is part of the layout but not part of the the induviual page content, you put it in the template.
I cant give you any code examples as I will avoid flash like the pague. I guess you should use a normal tag for it. and determine the position and layout with css (or inline).

Why is flash annoying? You might find that, but others might not? I mean, in the header of my website amygdela.com is also some flash and IMHO it looks pretty darn cool!

What about flash not being a webstandard?
What about flash mostly being used for annoying ad's? (crazyfrog anyone?)
As I stated before it seldom does add something of value to the user.
When I visit a website I do not want a avalanche of things obviously there to impress me. I want the information I am looking for and I don't care how cool the designer thinks he is.

In the case of your blog, what it adds is the fade-over between the pictures, nothing more. To me that is more distraction than value.
That is just my opinion, and you can safely ignore it if you disagree.

All,

Ok! I have had ENOUGH!! I did a search on using Flash with CMSMS. Of the numerous threads I have looked at, each and EVERY one of them have spewed their opinion of how horrible they think Flash is and perhaps justifiably so. However, precious few have supplied any of the requested help. If people want to use an annoying, useless, yammer, yammer, yammer thing in their sites, so be it. In the mean time, this is not a blog; it is a HELP forum. Mind you, getting the opinion with the help bothers me not at all. (Frankly, I tend to agree with much of it!!) But searching for genuinely useful help in solving problems and getting nothing but the pontification is much more a waste of time than is putting up with someone's gawdy Flash decorations.

Having said that, I have a client who wants the flash header. However, I cannot get it to appear in CMSMS. I put it in the header section of the template using the usual HTML tags that have always worked outside CMSMS.
The best I get is a white box where the Flash should be. Any suggestions?

Thank you in advance for your help.

--Allen

'ello
gimme an address to take a looksy...

Hey,

Thanks for your response in spite of my rant (or because of??). However, I don't have this in production as yet. It is on a localhost for development. Is there any code I can post that will help?

My testing specs:

cmsms 1.0.2
Win XP Home
XAMPP Lite 1.5.3 (?)

Standard configuaration on everything except I changed the cmsmadesimple directory name to cmsms.

--Allen

You may need to point this straight to your file... absolute path...

src="Banner.swf"

The source requires Flash 5 or greater....did you use a later version of Flash?
It appears that the Flash movie ISN'T being loaded, thus the white screen!
The Flash swf file will probably need to be in a specific place, maybe uploaded to a directory in uploads called flash, thus the source file will need to point to uploads/flash/banner.swf
I have managed to place a Flash item into a page using fckeditor, but to put it straight into the header is a different matter

Just giving my 2 penneth worth - but instead of using a flash file as a header, why not use the Dynamic Text Replacement method: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/dynatext

This means you can style your heading in whichever font you require, whilst maintaining the structure of your content.

Here is how you could do it

In the layout css

define
#flash {
position:absolute;
top:1.1em;
padding-left: 17.0em;
}

you can adjust the position according to your needs

Then go to your template
add this
on the top

thenwhere ever you need the flash file to appear add the following in the template

show();

this is what goes in the flash.js
function show()
{
document.write('\n');
document.write('\n');
document.write('\n');
document.write('\n');
document.write('\n');
}

replace the with the flash file name

Hope this helps

All,

Thank you all loads for your suggestions. In the end it was a simple suggestion that made it work. Thanks 3dcandy. I apparently needed to be pulling the flash file from "uploads/flash". Why it needs to be there, I don't fathom.

--Allen

PS. While I don't have a production version of the cmsms site, there is a site running that shows the flash file in question. It's a simple anim. to add a bit of visual interest while (hopefully) not being too irritating. http://musicalmission.org/about.html.