Posted by tjholowaychuk on December 5, 2007 at 2:59am
I have spent the last few months learning as much as I can about AIR / Flex / AS3 and I would like a crack at developing something useful for drupal. Any ideas are definatly welcome, I was thinking mainly of some administration tools which could just speed up the workflow but I would love suggestions.
Comments
Got one in the pipeline
Our firm has one in the pipes and will show it off come 2008 but I had an Adobe Technologies + Drupal inspiration session at Drupal Camp LA. I talked about using custom node types in applications for things like: feedback forms, bug reports, and application logs (watchdog). I covered a lot of broad ideas, I can post my slides if people would like.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
Slides from Drupal Camp LA
Hey Chris - I was in your session at Drupal Camp LA, and was wondering if you posted those slides yet? I can't find them. In particular, I believe there was one slide related to open source flash/flex development that I was interested in seeing. But seeing them all at this point would be a good review. Thanks!
--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
Yes, slides would be
Yes, slides would be awesome!
update
I am not with the firm I mentioned above, in December 2008, and nothing ever came out of that firm for the Drupal community.
I did get a note from others doing this, and I found http://www.riapedia.com/2007/09/26/create_and_edit_blog_posts_with_airpress so there are people doing this and I'm happy to see that.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
Yes, please, I'm very
Yes, please, I'm very interested in seeing those slides! I'm sure other folks are too. Can't wait to see what you've come up with next year too.
Aaron Winborn
Advomatic, Web Design for Progressive Advocacy, Grassroots Movements, and Really Cool Causes
Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (my book, available now!)
AaronWinborn.com
Advomatic
Awesome
That would be great to see. I was planning on building a "Drupal Administrator" AIR application which would allow you to add all of your Drupal installs as accounts and then it would periodically update a local SQL database just keeping you in tune with how your sites are doing displaying quick information such as :
Site status ( ping to make sure its online )
Node, user, and other content counts
Server status
Users online, Guests online
Quick links to clear cache, manually run cron etc
All which would be available along side with your other Drupal installations just allowing for quick admin actions and over all just a nice look at how your sites are holding up, BUT the only part of this I am uncertain about is connecting to the remote databases since im sure no one would want to pipe their requests through my PHP app in order to handle the remote queries so I suppose they would have to set up my "server" module on any one of their sites which would then handle the authentication and database queries from that one Drupal install. I dont know it was just a quick thought.
vision media
350designs
Tj Holowaychuk
Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design
Victoria British Columbia Web Design School
Hard part #2
What's really hard is when you have to alter the UI to render administration differently when certain versions of modules are installed.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
Yeah I can imagine that
Yeah I can imagine that being really annoying changing things up depending on which modules/versions of those modules are installed, I am more than eager to work on something but I dont want to waste my time on something useless either I would way rather come up with something that is practical even if its a simple tool like RegexBuddy
vision media
350designs
Tj Holowaychuk
Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design
Victoria British Columbia Web Design School
OT: I dig Regexbuddy
Off topic: I dig Regexbuddy.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
WYSIWYG
wow would i ever love a flex wysiwyg right now, im so sick of fck and tinymce, and I dont really think have 500+ files for a wysiwyg is very clean i feel like im ruining my site everytime I install one of those modules haha..
vision media
350designs
Tj Holowaychuk
Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design
Victoria British Columbia Web Design School
Is there any interest in
Is there any interest in forming a loose team to tackle some more robust projects together?
Certainly. Let me know what
Certainly. Let me know what you have in mind. I still think the idea of having a centralized point to access all of your Drupal installations would be very handy. Monitoring their status as well as reporting back quick log charts and things like that.
vision media
350designs
Tj Holowaychuk
Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design
Victoria British Columbia Web Design School
dog pile
I'm game. anything in particular?
--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
Links to my slides
Here are my slides from my Adobe Tech & Drupal session at DrupalCampLA 2007. Slides available in PDF and ODP (Open Office Presentation) formats.
All my other slides are here:
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
any glimpse on what is in the pipelines?
(from the slides of ccharlton)
are you suggesting you (your firm) has some kind of template engine for flash/flex in the pipelines? :)
on flash/flex and drupal integration, there are several possibility's (ideas I have been playing around with, but mainly due to time constrains they didnt went in development or been released as opensource):
full flash/flex websites with drupal underneath, which allows deeplinking and SEO-friendly websites
for this I have developped an as2 framework, and some custom services + flash module (and custom template) which does the trick very nicely… but after 1 year of testing and several projects with it, I notice some flexibility issues (eg. menus vs. taxonomy = simple, one cck / one page vs. complex, multiple cck / one page), and mainly, everybody is switching to as3, therefore it became kinda obsolete (and therefore is not released till today)
if there is intrest in this, I would appreciate some help to speed up development (mainly on the php side to have it more conform to Drupal), so an as3 flash/flex framework and the necessary drupal modules could be developped/finetuned
or form a team where I can contribute my experience/knowledge
drupal modules: (flash/flex extending the administration functionality)
- wysiwyg text editor (with possibility to upload swf files as shared fonts, that can be either used in a full flash site, or html site with sifr)
- swfupload cck field (I have this one partly done, but on hold till some client really needs it and pay for the development ;)
- asset management (an overall asset management tool, for images, audio, video… along with some asset cck field… we all know those photoshop RIAs, why not have something similar for Drupal, where images can be manipulated etc.)
not my field, so no ideas, sorry :)
as it is, maybe several teams would be needed to tackle the different dimensions/needs?
but more importantly, what are the main needs of evryone??
How do you suppose that full
How do you suppose that full flash website are SEO friendly? I have heard of this concept with Drupal before, however I dont really believe it. Sure you can still have indexable versions of the content, but it will not get ranked even remotely the same as if the traffic was hitting the content directly.
vision media
350designs
Tj Holowaychuk
Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design
Victoria British Columbia Web Design School
as opposed to no indexing at
as opposed to no indexing at all, this concept/technique is allready a great improved, and it works
I have made several sites using this concept:
- all the content is indexed, eg. a product on a page as 'mysite.com/product/someproductname' is indexed in google (because of the underlying html content)
- deeplinking/direct linking is made possible with swfaddress, and a custom theme + module adds some url-rewriting/redirection; basicly google indexes 'mysite.com/product/someproductname', list this, users follow link and get redirected to a hashed uri 'mysite.com/#/product/someproductname'
- all page hits are submitted to google analytics with swfaddress; eg. 'mysite.com/#/product/someproductname' submits the page '/product/someproductname' to googe analytics
one point that doesnt work as html sites is when people copy/paste the uri and post this on theyre site, so google does not count 'mysite.com/product/someproductname' and 'mysite.com/#/product/someproductname' as the same uri, and therefore does not improve the ranking
so there is room for improvement, but this is allready a big improvement opposed to no indexing at all
(maybe I should have called it SEO-friendlier :)
haha yeah I agree it is
haha yeah I agree it is definatly better than nothing, however if the client is serious about SEO and SEM a full flash site will burden them horribly
Tj Holowaychuk
Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design
Victoria British Columbia Web Design School
Google can now read the text in your SWF
Read my little post on it and you can read more from the links I provide.
http://laflash.org/node/385
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
...but no dynamic text
at least, this is what i gathered: they can read static text in the swf, and anchors (this allready since flash 8, probably the SDK was released at that time), but no dynamic loaded content…
as it stands, drupal is a content management system/framework with nice features for SEO
html is the presentation layer, as flash/flex is…
the fact that search engines cannot handle javascript (same for several devices), the technique of overwriting the html body with a flash layer (thru javascript) is an ideal way to have a degrading presentation layer (if javascript&&flash = flash, otherwise html)
and most (if not all) of the SEO techniques that drupal provides are still valid (robots.txt, h1 for titles, meta tags, clean urls, …)
…this offcourse only work if you have a menu/site structure that is accesible publicly, and content-wise is same in html as in flash/flex (therefore the need of a custom AS framework that handles the state of the flash movie)
Yup...
And don't forget XML/XSLT.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
Im not even sure what we are
Im not even sure what we are talking about anymore haha, I thought this was regarding a FULL flash site, not just the body content, in respect of a full flash site I highly doubt the flash content is indexed and ranked in the same manor as regular semantic html, there are just way to many things that SE's take into consideration
vision media
350designs
Tj Holowaychuk
Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design
Victoria British Columbia Web Design School
you are right...
at least about the fact that SE take alot in consideration…
as I said, links coming from the full flash site (so coming from an uri with a hash) will not be considert as the uri w/o hash, or when people copy/paste the hashed uri and post it on their site/blog, then again SE will not consider it as the same uri
mysite.com/somepage != mysite.com/#/somepage (this is obvious)
so in this regard, html is beneficial
but to show what can be done with the technique, google for 'visualisatie van kunst in het verkeer' (dutch site, 'visualisation of art in traffic', will not post the site as it is for a commercial client, no need to give them 'airtime' for free), normally you should have the site ranked 1st (recognisable from the | character of drupal… hint: urban ducktape ;), if you follow that link it will bring you on a subpage of the site (direct link) with this sentence in the content.
This is achieved by using drupal and the technique described above, so no extra meta tags, or submitting a sitemap to google etc (which could be done to improve ranking)… so solely from the optimalisation for SE that drupal provide 'out of the box', and the links from external sites
hope this re-assures you that we are in fact talking about full-flash :)
(and I didnt claim this technique is as SEO-friendly as html can be, but at least it is a good portion of it)
You lost me with the "google
You lost me with the "google for 'visualisatie van kunst in het verkeer'" part, but I get what your saying and hey! anything is better than nothing
vision media
350designs
Tj Holowaychuk
Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design
Victoria British Columbia Web Design School
Yes
Yes, we started developing an administration panel built for our RichMediaX owners (http://richmediax.com) and we're not ready to show or release anything yet but 2008 just started. :)
As for the MXML template engine, this was something I had schemed up and tinkered with but I'm still getting into Drupal templates/themes before I even try to say I "have an engine working."
As for your three ideas posted, you're correct that each scenario is tangible.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
again, no admin app
There is no admin app from RichMediaX. The developers who are maintaining it have no plans to produce an AIR administration app. Just letting folks know since I'm catching up with this topic.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
Choosing an open micro-architecture/framework
I like PureMVC, and would like to hear of others into this framework/methodology of building Flex/ActionScript applications. Anyone? Drupal heads?
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
P.S. > HTML object class
Don't forget, AIR has the ability to render HTML windows using Webkit built-in.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
Need Help on a GPL application for Non-profits Using Drupal?
I'm developing an application to benefit the Open Media project (funded by the Knight Drupal Initiative), and would love assistance in its development. The application will utilize Flex to display content from Drupal for public, educational, and government media organizations, creating a low-cost digital signage system for community broadcast.
Current ideas and module dependencies:
Calendar
CCK
Views
XMLRPC (I may elect to use AFMPHP when there is a 6.0 release)
I've gotten preliminary buy-in from a number of community media organizations, and even have some preliminary funding (although I would like to use it sparingly - not really enough to fund commercial Flex development).
The application will be GPL licensed, and will probably be utilized throughout the US in some major media markets. As an opportunity to commercial development participants, I will be offering a "credit" slide to participating commercial developers, which means your company information could be displayed on U.S. television to hundreds of thousands of viewers.
I hope this sparks your interest, you can learn more by checking out the Open Media group on Drupal, as well as PEGSpace and the Knight Drupal Initiative.
Flex + Drupal Example
I have been integrating Flex and Drupal for over a year now and have used some really great tools to make life easier.
I have blended some of these so that I can quickly kickoff new projects.
The version I am putting up is for drupal5 using:
Services Module 5.x-0.92
AMFPHP Module 5.x-1.0-beta1
The MVC approach followed is the EasyMVC approach as described here
The Drupal AMFPHP connection is made using ThirdAve Design’s DrupalSite library
you can find the download and more info at
http://www.dinesh.co.za/fluxmvc-drupal-flex-mvc-framework/
fridge.search("beer")
New Adobe.com article for Flash/Flex + Drupal
Here's a new article posted on Adobe.com covering Flash/Flex + Drupal - http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/drupal_flash.html
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us