SWFAddress Module for Drupal Unleashed

Tonight, Steven Merrill and I committed and released our first beta version of SWFAddress.module for Drupal 5.x. We demo'd an early alpha version at DrupalCampWI a few weeks ago and Steve has been hard at work shoring it up for release.

Steve and I came up with the concept for Druplash and Druplex (what we call Drupal powered Flash and Flex sites) about a year ago and have just been toying with them ever since. We recently got ourselves in gear when Steve needed to build a new portfolio (link coming soon) for his future career as an opera singer.

Using the great SWFObject and SWFAddress javascript libraries and the Services and AMFPHP Modules for Drupal, we figured out how to build full Flash and Flex experience sites which degrade nicely to full HTML underneath for SEO.

Not too long ago, Asual released SWFAddress 2.0 with a new way of doing SEO (previously it was a few lines in .htaccess and now it is all php driven). We didn't notice this, of course, until days before our presentation at DrupalCampWI, so we spent our carride up to Milwaukee programming a quick and dirty module for Drupal which integrated the new PHP-based method for SEO.

Steve has spent the last few weeks cleaning it up and adding a ton of new features to the admin configuration screens.

We've already found (and fixed) a few bugs and will be releasing an update soon. Plus we're working on some articles and tutorials (and a demo video) to show everyone else how to use this module on your own content-managed Flash experience sites and also some of the tricks we've discovered in Flash and Flex to make remote service calls easily reusable.

So check it out! Start making your own search engine friendly, gracefully degrading, deep-link bookmarkable, content-managed, Drupal powered, Flash and Flex experience sites!