Archive for the ‘PressConnect’ Category

Hi all,

My new Flash – WordPress template is now available from my lab. It is coded in Actionscript 3 using Flash CS4.

You can check out the example site in the lab too.

For more details click here

Hi all,

After several months of working in my spare time, I have finally launched a new version of my website, this time based on Actionscript 3.

I still have more work I want to do on the site before I am happy with it. Both visually, and behind the scenes.

Converting my website to AS3 was more difficult than I ever imagined. I have written a lot of stuff using Adobe Flex (see Lifetick’s app) and am very familiar with AS3 but in the Flash IDE it was very tough.

Flex builder is based on Eclipse and it is a very strong coding environment. For a start, all classes are automatically imported, there is great code completion (including completing your own classes, variables, function etc…) The debugging is excellent, including debugging from the browser, and it will not even compile if you have a problem in your code (flash sort of did this, but too many mistakes went through with out identification)

The problems with Flash CS4 are too numerous to mention. Aside from Performance, the workspace layout feels too complicated and cluttered. The new motion editor for tweens seems great, but just makes it harder to do simple tweens (maybe I need more time with it) The debugging was very difficult. As I said before, you could not debug from the browser only from a stand alone swf (if I am wrong about that, please correct me in the comments with instructions), The connection between classes and movie clips feels disjointed, movie clips are not as strict as classes but it feels weird to code, plus I didn’t seem to be able to override a function of the class my movie clip is based on.

At the end of the day, I didn’t enjoy making this new version of my site, I felt I battled with Flash the whole time, everything was a struggle, and it left me wanting to return to Flex as fast as possible. If you do any application building, you must try Flex, and leave flash behind, you will not believe the difference.

ps: I have removed the AS2 version of my template from sale, I hope to make the AS3 version available for sale at a later date.

I often hear people asking why I didn’t use XML RPC when I created my WordPress – Flash Blog.

I thought I needed to explain my reasoning.

First up, WordPress’s XML-RPC API appears to designed mainly for Creating Editing posts, not designing a front end. So you need to think about that fact when looking at my reasoning. For backend integration, it is alright… I guess.

My main criticism of the XML-PRC process is how verbose the XML requests and responses are.
By knowing exactly what information I need to make a database request, and exactly what information I need back, I can simplify the xml requests and responses to make them, smaller, faster, and simpler to understand and work with.

Here is a samplexmlrpc response, and a samplepressconnect response. The Press Connect response is half the size of the xml-rpc.

I know there are advantages to the xml-rpc specification, but I can’t personally warm too much to something that verbose when I can write my own function which does the job in half the time, and something which I find easier to work with.

Since this is a Flash blog, many of you might wonder if it is visible to Search Engines. Well I am happy to say it is. It is a rather simple thing but one I felt I needed to explain.

When you arrive at http://tvwonline.net, you are met by a page which redirects you to /flash/. However what you don’t know is that on my domain’s default page there is a link to the real wordpress site. This may not be noticed or looked at by visitors but it is by Google.

So if you find a link to my site on Google and click it where do you go? Well you end up on the WordPress Blog, but, because of my WordPress configuration, any link you click will take back to the Flash version, AND, you get taken back to the correct page on the flash site. (At this point I would like to direct you to the browser’s address bar. You will see that everytime you change pages, the site url is changed. Allowing for Deep Linking, Back/Forward and Google Analytics Statistics to work.

So landing on the WordPress Blog from Google is not always ideal, I could redirect the user using Flash, so they come to the Flash site automatically, but I have left it as a manual process. Recently I had the opportunity to speak to a optimisation expert from Google who advised the same.

So there you have it. Please direct anyone who says with Flash you don’t get Search Engine Visibility/ Back-Forward Support/ Deep-linking or Website Statistics to this post and this Blog.

After receiving many requests for my website’s .fla file, I have finally decided to make it available on my site – but for a price.

It is the same .fla this website is based on. You can find it here (along with an example of what you get)

I offer it in two prices, one for personal use. i.e. for your own site, and a commercial version for multiple customer’s of yours.

My reasoning for selling it is to try and recoup my hosting costs, and because people offered my money for it – and who am I to say no

Anyway, I hope this makes it slightly easier for other people wanting to make a website like this.

If you don’t want to pay, there is still free code available, including the php backend which extracts the data from wordpress and some clever actionscript 2 classes which should make the job easier.

All the details and conditions are available on the link.

I have updated my Lab website with updates to my XML output for WordPress and new code to assist with exchanging XML between Flash and PHP.

The Updates to PressConnect, (My WordPress code – which is behind this website) feature new cleaner code and more commenting. There are also new code relating to Categories for WordPress 2.3.1.

There is also new Flash XML to PHP code. This hopes to make it easy for you to send XML to PHP and act on it.

Along with the new code is a new look for my lab which I hope you will also enjoy.

I must also give a thanks to Daniel who supplied the new categories function in PressConnect.

After the success of my PressConnect (an xml output for WordPress) code release, I have extended the Lab section of my website to include some actionscript 2.

Available is an XML to Object class, a Menu Generator Class and some cool Date handling functions. All code which powers this website.
Hopefully you can all benefit from this code, and, I intend to release more code in the future. The aim is to eventually release the source code to my WordPress to Flash website. Plus I also want to release some Actionscript 3 code for use in Flex.

So keep an eye on my site for future code releases.

Click Here to visit my Lab

Ever Since I launched my Flash website with a WordPress backend, I have received numerous emails and comments asking me how I did it.

Today I will make available some of the PHP code I wrote to extract Data from WordPress in an XML format. I have also created a diagram and explanation on how my website works to hopefully assist anyone else who wants to try the same thing.

I should point out that I haven’t made available an end to end solution, you will still need to do a lot of work, but I hope that I have provided a good starting point.

The PHP Script makes an SQL query to a MYSQL database holding the WordPress Data. The PHP Script then formats the data into XML. This then can be loaded by your Flash Website. There are functions to retrieve Posts and create Menus.

This is the first time I have released any code snippets or any sort of guides, I hope it proves useful.

Click Here for the Download and Explanation.

I got a cool surprise the other week, – since updating my Flash Website with SWFAddress, Google Analytics has been providing detailed statistics of page views.

For new readers, my website is a Flash front end on a WordPress backend. I was initially worried about how I was going to track page views on my Flash Blog. I put my Google Analytics code on my site’s page just so I could get a least some data. I never realised that it would record all the page views.

SWFAddress provides Deeplinking support by updating the address in the browser’s address bar when ever you click a link on my site, it also updates the title on the Browser’s windows. My Flash website listens for updates and changes the content based on what the address is.

If you have a Flash site and want to track usage, get hold of SWFAddress (http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/) & sign up for Google Analytics.