my blog

Did you know that if you type

view-source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/

into the location bar of Firefox you go straight to the source code of the page. When you are developing a CMS powered site you could include this on every page whilst developing a site to quickly see the source?

The Flash Loaded site has some excellent components delivering carosel style navingations for images. They are a bit like the Piclens add on for Mozilla which is trully amazing!

The Flash Loaded site has some excellent components delivering carosel style navingations for images. They are a bit like the Piclens add on for Mozilla which is trully amazing!

To view the php error logs use the following command.

tail /etc/php_error.log

You have several options available when it comes to interfacing Drupal with Flash / Flex. There are a couple of modules you will want to evaluate

Drupal and Adobe Flex are perfect partners. The key to making the two systems communicate is understanding the Drupal Services Module. This provides the communication layer between Flex and the Drupal API / Database. The services module comes with some useful built in facilities such as loading nodes, accessing the taxonomy. Extending the module with your own services is really easy. The code powering the module is rudimentary for anyone familiar with module development.

Not sure why but in the past few weeks I have had several clients ask for page flipping features like on the Dreamworks site for example. After a little digging I found this Flash Source File which delivers the functionality required.If you are happy to pay for a component the flipping book flash component is pretty awesome. 

Since my jumping ship from Coldfusion to Drupal, it is fair to say I have rarely felt the need to look back, except to do painful legacy application support. It is fascinating to see that Drupal beats Coldfusion on Google Trends and has done for over a year.

I have been looking at creating some interfaces with flash from data held in Drupal. I didn't want to use complex methods such as web services gateways so it occured to me that I could expose my data using XML and views. Flash is pretty good at reading in XML. I used the following code to prove the concept taken from an example an kirupa.com

This Flash action script takes the rss feed for my site and passes it into Flash.

I am a big fan of the Thickbox jQuery plugin. A slick alternative to this is the Lightbox 2 javascript library which looks pretty easy to integrate into we sites. I was impressed to discover that there is even a Drupal Module for this library, Lightbox V2. I thought I would write one but someone beat me to it!