Major Design Dilemma.

[Teonnyn]

I am building a website that uses Flash in several places, and is currently powered by the Joomla CMS. However as of late, I have been considering switching fully to Flash supported by an occasional php page for smaller sections such as the Member's Pages.This may even develop into a minor "meeting area" (Habbo Hotel as one example). To be utterly honest, Joomla is actually getting in the way of a few things with their component code requirements for building extensions - and it's really only used for the text.. In this case, is Flash the best way to go?

[yell0wdart]

Sounds like it. When a big part of your infrastructure is getting in the way and is only used for a small piece of functionality, I'd be in favor of finding a better, more streamlined solution. Could use something like jQuery with static XHTML or a couple custom PHP pages to elegantly display textual information.

[Teonnyn]

What about membership-based sites in Flash? Are they very practical or not?

[yell0wdart]

They could be, since your server posts are going to be asynchronous from Flash, any calls to your database can be handled in the background with minimal impact to the user (no ugly screen refresh, etc).

[Teonnyn]

Newbie question here, but could anyone point out website design tutorials that deal in Flash and membership websites?

[swivelmaster]

I don't know of any, but that's exactly what we're doing where I work.

We may at some point publish some official info about what we've done, but I'll give you some hints:

Flash does NOT have direct access to browser cookies, but sending out any kind of url request (URLLoader, HTTPService, etc.) will have the browser automatically bundle the proper cookies for the domain. This is NOT true with FileReference.upload(), however, so if you're going to use that you need to come up with another kind of validation.

What you CAN do is use a pre-made system that uses cookies (for whatever server side language you're using - we're using Rails) and then have the server respond based on the cookie that comes back from the browser automatically.

So for instance, if the user is NOT logged in, you send a URLRequest with username and password variables set, and if it checks out you respond with something that says the user is logged in along with a session cookie (or a dated cookie, whatever you want). You're going to have to send a request to the server that indirectly checks that cookie every time the app starts up, but while you're in it you just need to look out for a message back from the server saying that you are NO LONGER logged in (otherwise you can assume that if the first "good to go" message came int, you're still logged in).

Still with me?

As long as you can track whether you're logged in, everything else should work fine by sending URLRequests and getting the response. You need to remember, you'll have to be dealing with asynchronous functionality EVERYWHERE, which is very different from what most Flash developers are used to.

It CAN be done, though, so don't despair.

But it's a LOT of work. Worth it once it works though.

I'll try to answer any additional questions here.