Building a Forum in flash..

omegus · 09-12-2002, 10:32 PM

I have looked around the web for information on building a forum in flash. So far I have not had much luck.

Is it there a reason that forums are not built in flash, too hard, too slow, too buggy?

I am just starting down the road to learning php and such. My coding skills are very limited but I am learning. I love working with flash. My html skill is just as bad as my php skill. I would much prefer to build my site in flash.

Any sugestions?

**Bunkermaster** · 09-13-2002, 06:24 AM

flash is client side ONLY.
How would your users see other people's posts?
would you generate a ming everytime you want to display a new message?
where would you store the posts?

stuartc1 · 09-13-2002, 06:35 AM

I believe Coldfusion has been integrated heavily in the newer flash versions, so it must be posibly to do some Server type apps that have Flash as the front end. Have you seen the free HTML email site www.toast.com - it has been done in flash and must use some type of Server language to run the backend.
But I must agree that Flash itself is only Client side, and its pretty new in the Server Side integration area, so it may well be pretty buggy. Personaly I wouldnt touch it with a bage pole.

dannys · 09-13-2002, 06:49 AM

If you're feeling really brave (or stupid) you could use ming to generate the whole thing each time.

But Flash has the ability to get variables from webpages and you can simply use PHP to generate those webpages.

Flash frontend & PHP backend. The whole Flash experience will totally annoy any useability expert though (can't change font size/colour/face - can't run it through text to speech convertors etc).

There's a fairly basic (but it does give you the gist) article http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/hill20011214.php3 on PHPBuilder.

Wave · 09-13-2002, 07:08 AM

actually the best way to get structured data (as forum threads-posts is) is using XML. and if the Thing will be done right, it will not be slower-harder-and-more-buggy than pure HTML forum.
all depends of developer skills. MMflash is wery flexible tool.

by the way, as far as i know, Nilsen works on flash useability with Macromedia, and i think in Flash After-MX we will see many interesting innovations.

Regards.

dannys · 09-13-2002, 07:19 AM

Well we don't even have a FlashMX plugin for Unix yet, so lord knows how long it'll take to get to any Flash-After-MX plugin!

Wave · 09-13-2002, 07:51 AM

life flows fast, two or three years, may be four.

but key phrase in my previous posting is the "Forum with Flash+XML+PHP+SomeDB is real".

and, sorry, my english is not good enough to understand all intonation tones and thin idioms.

mmmm....

"...so lord knows..."

is it irony?

**Bunkermaster** · 09-13-2002, 07:55 AM

Indeed, I believe so O'Neill

bealers · 09-13-2002, 07:17 PM

Flash is *pants*

I can understand why Designers and Marketing types love it, but....
/me manages to stop going off on a Rant.

If you want a forum and have only basic skills, something like Phorum[.org] is still dead easy to install and it's not based on proprietary ****e, oops, there I go again..

BTW it has been possible to create Dynamic Flash sites for ages, that was the whole point of Macromedia Generator, I remember seeing it at a Macromdeia Seminar when Flash 3 first came out

--
;D.

bealers · 09-13-2002, 08:11 PM

I meant to add that with Generator you would add placeholders for text etc, so you wouldn't have to create the movie every time