Beginner needs some direction.

[adingman99]

Hi All,

I am just beginning with Flash (well, any programming for that matter). I have a flash template for my wifes site, nothing special, just a nice photo gallery. This is not for a business or to make money, just a personal site for her pictures. I have it published and live. The problem I am having is being able to edit the files. I opened the .fla in flash and made a few small changes, but can't figure out how to change anything else. For example I was able to change the top text to be customized for the site, but can't figure out how to get it to display online. I saved the .fla and replaced the old one on the server. Is there something else I need to update for the changes to actually display? Also, there are 4 default gallery links:

1) How do I rename these? In the .fla there is only a place holder for one and it says Gallery 000.

2) How can I add more links for extra galleries?

I have spent some time on google and adobe's site looking for help on this, but have not found anything that helps (but I did learn to make a 2 second video :) ). Anyhow, I can understand the RTFM philosophy of many people, so if anyone can even point mo to somewhere that might help me do this (I.E. a tutorial that actually covers this) it is greatly appreciated. I am using Flash CS3. Are there other programs I need to use to do this?

Thank you in advance for the info!

[edited by: eelixduppy at 4:58 pm (utc) on Aug. 29, 2008]
[edit reason] removed URL [/edit]

[mr_nabo]

Apologies if this is too simple a question, but have you cleared your browsers cache after uploading the new swf? Also, you are uploading the .swf you exported from flash, not the .fla right?

[adingman99]

Well, I guess not too simple a question, as no. I am not seeing a .swf from what I changed. So in flash I made my changes to the .fla. How do I get a new .swf file?

Edit:

Ok, found the .swf and loaded it. Changes are there! Thanks for that one. Any suggestions on the other item for adding links for more gallery pages?

Thanks again for any help.

[mr_nabo]

Explain a little bit more what you're doing with the gallery - you say you have 4 default gallery links, but is this something you created from scratch or used the Flash template to create? I'm assuming the latter because you say there are 4 default links to images and this is the same number in the CS3 template.

Flash is a complex program, so you'll need to learn the basics of how things work and some actionscript to do something like a sophisticated gallery.

However, after playing around a bit with the template (assuming that's what you're using), all you'll need to do to add more photos to the gallery is add more photos to the timeline on the pictures layer and make sure the other layers have frames as well so that the background and buttons etc. are present.

Hope that helps.

[adingman99]

You are correct that it is a template I started with. It currently has 4 galleries on it. The part I am confused about is that when I open the fla in Flash there is only a placeholder for one gallery link. With the template (not from adobe) there are 4 files called gallery_01.xml to gallery_o4.xml. I assumer that since there was nothing more on the .fla file I could just duplicate the xml files and name them gallery_05.xml and gallery_06.xml. When I go to edit the .xml files there is not a whole lot there. All have the same headder than some info for the pics each gallery page will have. So I am a bit lost on figuring out how the site pulls these when there is only one spot for gallery links on the .fla file. Here are the names of the files that came with the template:

.zip file contains the following.
Folder: Photos - this has all the pics used on the demo template.
flashmo_060_gallery01.xml
flashmo_060_gallery02.xml
flashmo_060_gallery03.xml
flashmo_060_gallery04.xml
flashmo_060_gallery.fla
flashmo_060_gallery.html
flashmo_060_gallery.swf

Based off this info is there anything else I may need to edit? If I don't change the html to default.html or index.html the page will not load.

Hope this info helps you to understand what I am doing. As always any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[mr_nabo]

Hi,

Well, if it involves calling XML files then I may not be the best person to ask. But my understanding (and only try this on copy of your .fla, not the original), is that you need to update the actionscript within the .fla to call the new .xml files you've created, otherwise Flash won't know there are more galleries to load.

To be honest, it's pretty hard to advise you on how to go forward if you're using a third-party template for this gallery. I (and anyone else here) don't know how it is set up or the actionscript used to call the .xml files, so any advice I offer from now on would be a bit like guessing blind about the changes you should make.

What template are you using? PM me the link to the site you got it from and I'll see if it's obvious how it works from that. Otherwise, you could send me a link to a .zip file of the template itself and I could take a look at how it all fits together?

Your call.

[adingman99]

PM sent

I have somewhat figured out the actionscripts. Able to now see the new galleries on main page. Still learning how to setup the pictures with the xml files. Currently it is setup tu use a line for each photo like this:
<photo filename="DSC001612.jpg" thumbnail="s_DSC001612.jpg" description="" />

Is there a way to automate this a bit so every pic doesn't have to be manually added?

I am also having a bit of trouble with the scroll bar. The actionscript looks like this:
scroller_mc._y = scrollable_area_mc._y;
tn_group._y = tn_area._y;
sr = tn_area.height/tn_group._height;
scroller_mc._height = scrollable_area_mc._height * sr;
sd = scrollable_area_mc._height - scroller_mc._height;
cd = tn_group._height - tn_area._height;
cr = cd / sd;
tn_group.setMask(tn_area);

The scroll bar does show up, however the scroller is not all the way at the top, and it scrolls farther than the scroller area is.

Thanks again for all the help!

[adingman99]

Perfect, Thank you.

Solution provided courtesy mr nabo:

looked at the template and added an image and gallery page by just editing the xml file, actionscript within the first frame inside the movie clip 'flash mo photo gallery' so that it included the gallery_name and gallery_file and finally adding the photos you reference in the xml files to the photos folder that you need to upload.

Also, if you want to think about accessibility and replacing the swf for an image should your users not have flash enabled, then do a google search for 'SWFObject' and you'll find a useful method to embed flash files):

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0" width="425" height="306" id="d2d-intro" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="false" />
<param name="movie" value="NAME_OF_YOUR_FILE.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff" />
<embed src="NAME_OF_YOUR_FILE.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="425" height="306" name="d2d-intro" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" allowFullScreen="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />

</object>