Easy-To-Edit Flash Templates???

[courtjester]

Hey guys. I am wondering if this is a good idea to think about... I mean I have seen it done (several places) and have figured it out myself. Basically you store all the information in your database then you use PHP, or ASP to retrieve it. Then you Use the loadvariables (); command to load all the variables into the Flash movie itself. It's pretty cool, but is it worth the work? Please let me know what yall think on this subject. Thanks.

[Webforumz Staff]

If you (or your clients) want (and can afford) this sort of site then it can be very powerful. Dynamic flash is one of the most engaging mediums, BUT... only for certain types of sites. It can also be very difficult to make in Flash, so unless you have a fair bit of actionscripting experience, it may not be for you.
Eg: What do you do if there is too much content to fit on the screen?
If you are passing Flash variables using &var=data then what if someone wants to use the & sign in their data?

There are a few simple problems like that, that you'll have to figure out before you can make something like this. I also think your flash animation could do with some polishing as there's no point having a dynamic all-singing site when the animation and presentation isn't top notch.

[courtjester]

Yeah, well it's mainly so that they can change the images and change the music / sound effects easily. It also allows them to change the content, but your right, I haven't thouhgt of a way to get around the & sign.. I can get around the character length easily by running a simple inquiry on the data and putting it in a text area if the data exceeds a certain size. It's not too complicated and I have done it in ASP before, so I am sure I could figure it out in ActionScript as well, although a text-area might not look best, lol. I might just stick to hand-editing everything at the moment. Thanks Sirkent for pointing out the things I haven't thought about.