[Pro] Flash help

Freeway
1

Freeway should provide much better support for such a popular and prevelant web format.

It isn’t Flash format support that’s the issue here; Freeway supports that pretty well. It is actually to do with some of the ways that Flash is used by developers, and that’s a major can o’ worms.

Basically, if you use a Flash-based thing that requires external media to be in a specifically-named folder you need to get that folder and it’s contents onto the server in one way or another… whatever site design software you might use. And there’s no fixed standard for this kind of structural setup, too.

I totally agree that the current uploader actions are somewhat limited, and that it would be very nice if it was a little more streamlined. But I don’t think it is particularly difficult to add Flash media to the Freeway page in the normal manner and then upload the required folder/file structures to the appropriate place in your site. I do this with my panorama work; this uses separate XML, JPEG, license, SWF and other files, and I normally keep them organised in three different folders - one generic, the others specific to individual panoramas or groups of panoramas.

Maybe if actions were able to modify the upload process directly in order to have custom FTP commands (for example mkdir) executed? Or, better, if Freeway’s Site panel could be used for more than just a reflection of the page structure within the document… but that is a dream that would take serious software engineering. One day, perhaps.

k

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2

Thanks, K- I agree with you. I’ve always felt that one of the downsides to FW was that it will create a copy of your .swf files into your “Resources” folder if you embed it into an HTML item. It would be a HUGE “fix” in regards to Flash and other media integration to have FW reference files WHERE THEY STAND. In other words, if you have created a sub folder in the “Resources” directory called “audio”, and you had an .swf file in there, FW should be able to just reference the .swf file directly from the “audio” sub directory, rather than creating a copy of it in the “Resources” folder. This would eliminate a huge number of problems with Flash, especially when you have .swf files that relate to other XML, PHP, HTML, etc. files.

I’m not saying that FW should always reference files where they stand, but should at least have the option to do so. This way, a designer could choose which elements should be embedded/linked where they stand, thus eliminating many of the headaches that I and other users are currently encountering.

Again, for all those listening- this thread should be taken as a discussion. I think this is necessary for me to say because I feel like I have been complaining a lot about a program that I absolutely adore. Without these discussions, good software can’t be made better. Thanks again.

TB

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