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Drupal + Flash = A Bad Case of Druplash??
Okay, Druplash isn't a real trademark, but I will say that I've been playing with the Drupal Services module and AMFPHP modules, and I think that the potential to serve up a site using SWFObject, SWFAddress and Drupal 5 is incredible. In a nutshell, Drupal 5 lets you send entire blocks of content into a Flash movie of your choosing, and there's no performance hit on the Flash side. AMFPHP sends objects to Flash / Flex in a native binary format, so that you don't have to spend processing power on the client computer decoding XML.
In combination with SWFObject and SWFAddress, you could also serve up HTML content under each Flash page, and with the Mobit module, you could also maintain a mobile version.
The potential of this is absolutely groundbreaking. With one open source content mangement system, you could theoretically serve up a site that:
- Looks gorgeous and is completely dynamic to those computers which have Flash Player installed, with an easy-to-use Drupal administrative interface
- Can be published to with blogging tools such as ecto or MarsEdit (again, nothing new there, just a great feature of Drupal.)
- Is completely search-engine friendly, since HTML pages with links based on the menu structure are still available
- Can be adapted for mobile phones (since few phones have full-fledged Flash players, and since only a few PocketPC devices are still floating around with the Flash 7 plugin)
- Supports deep linking through careful integration with SWFAddress (this one is where a lot of research will have to be done.)
There's still a decent amount of research to be done to put all of these pieces together, and I'm thinking that's exactly what I'll do this summer.
Keep checking www.druplash.com, though - as soon as I have something more engaging than a node being remoted to Drupal, I'll put it up there.
Hey all, I've been working
Hey all,
I've been working a lot with flash and drupal lately. Our pilot site can be seen here: internal.
With some work you can get Google to index all of your sites' contents.
I've got some source files and example things I'd be glad to share. Send an email if you wish :)
Hi, I have been trying to
Hi, I have been trying to get the same sort of thing going for a while.
Toying with varius degrees of succes, none nearly as good as what you appear to have done.
Would it be possible to senf me some pointer/examples or even some source.
Anything would be great.
thanks :)
Nathan
Hello, Just wondering if you've done any more research or implemented any of the ideas that you put forth above? I'm certainly interested.
Russ
Yes please do there are a lot of visually talented flash developers out there who cant possibly hope to code such a thing.
Incredibly small world. While looking to see how everyone else is coupling Drupal 5 with Flash, I run into a fellow BU grad. Crazy!
I'm currently developing my company's new corporate site on Drupal 5 and have been messing with creating XML docs with PHP/mySQL to gather data for flash...but the performance really sucks. You're right, the potential is pretty amazing. Have you had any luck with building out a demo of this? If not, I will let you know when I do.
Steven,
What are the server specs for your sites using the AMFPHP module with the Services module? I'm hit and miss with it. Some servers I set it up on work perfect and others never return amf calls. I'm trying to figure out the 'x-factor' that is causing the bahavior. Thank you much.
Eric
Throw in that with SWFObject you can still render out your complete drupal site and then just replace the main container with Flash for javascript and flash enabled users and you are talking to just about the largest audience possible.