RSS feed into Flash .swf

Hey Anonymous,
The blogreader you mentioned is overkill. I have been using a flash component called FBlogViewer you can search for it here . It took just a “little” configuration but I was able to use it to read an RSS feed from a b2 blog (going to update client to wordpress soon). If you need an example I will try to finish up this client work and post the url to the site ??

Sorry…my first post on this blog…the url is https://www.flashcomponents.net

Nice! I’ll look into this one then. But what about past entries, categories and archives?

ahso, I see now. You want to create a full blog that runs off wordpress and has the “skin” of flash. Go with the first movieclip example…It’s not overkill. The component I meantioned can be modified but it is really meant to just read latest feeds from the rss output.

There are a few other components you might test that are on the url I gave you…I apologize for not testing them for you, but running a full blog from flash isn’t my cup – o’ – tea.

It’s funny how so many people are apprehensive of having a flashed blog. The reason I want to do this is to have both a standard html version of my website and a flash version, where I intend to add other interactive elements and animation. Instead of using flahs elements in an overall html interface, I want to do an entire interface in Flash (sites like https://www.2advanced.com are completely done in Flash and the result look pretty good).
Access to the complete Blog from this interface would be very usefull to me. The way your component is setup, it simply feeds from the wp-rss2.php file, right? How could the component read from archives? Wouldn’t a seperate php “feeder” file be necessairy?
Sorry about my limited knowledge of php…

…by the way, in the 2advanced example, they have their blog flashed but I notice that their archive link simply opens a popup to an html archive. If I could do it all in the flash interface, that would be preferable.

In order to feed data to Flash you can either point to a delimited output or use Flash Remoting.
There has been some work done for doing Flash Remoting for PHP, but it looks like nothing has changed since last year.
The first way would require you to have a new output page for your blog and archive. The output page can have multiple streams (for lack of a better word) of data. i.e.

1. Arhive link months
2. Category names
3. Latest posts

I would suggest that you pass up small data first, then when the Flash application needs it, you pass up the rest of the data.
You could also just have the Flash for the post content. Then everytime you clicked on the post to see it, the Flash application would retrieve the post you are looking for. This would probably be the easiest route since you could just make a template for the header, author, and body and pass in the parameter values through the data stream in the deliminted file.
I program in Flash at work, but I have other areas on my site to finish before looking into turning my blog into Flash.

Hi LoganSix, the method you outlined seems just like the RSS feed solution. WordPress’ wp-rss2.php file formats the output for mordacaidesign’s component. Or are you talking about something completely different?
Regarding the component I tried it out by having it call the wp-rss2.php file directly and it works at a first glance. However, I noticed that in the flash-scripting, the body of the post to be displayed refers to the xml noce called “description”.
In wp-rss2.php, “description” is *not* the actual content of the post, it’s just a description devoid of any links and other formatting.
So I changed “description” to “content:encoded” in the flash-script but no content shows up in the blog, only the post dates.
Mordacaidesign, have you actually tested your component with WordPress? Can you help?

so in other words, it gets rid of the middle man that is the RSS file!
If you do setup something for easy intergration with WordPress, perhaps a component, I’d be thilled! (and certainly not the only one)

Well, no easy integration. Looks like new queries have to be made so that the data is put into the correct format.
I made a quick app, that doesn’t work completely. I’m having some issues with mySQL query syntax.
Flash Blog Test
I had to create a query to get the categories, then one to get the post from the selected category, then the post details.

Flash Blogger
I found the above when I was messing around with Flash Remoting with PHP. They haven’t worked on it in a while, but it might be close to the total solution.

One other way is to use NUSOAP to generate SOAP/WSDL services and then discover them using the Web Services component in Flash MX 2004 Pro. There are other PHP link throughs, but I liked this because it would allow you to build more generic WSDL services from WordPress for other media that can call them.

I found a really easy way around all of the Flash Remoting and XML parsing and server installations of different types of services.

By utilizing the loadVars object in Flash, you can get it to do just about anything php can throw at it. I’ve been trying to figure out for months how to make my blog completely Flash, and realized with a little modification of the wp-rss2.php file, which does most of the work of stripping out unneccesary content and tags from the actual blog, and adding a few new functions to template_functions.php, I was able to get Flash to see the content of my blog, by allowing the php files to create the variables in url-encoded format, and passing it to the movie using the sendAndLoad function.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far, some customization is still left to be done, and some animation, but you get the general idea.

https://similitude.sim-designs.net/blog.html

I’ve been working at this as well…
for some reason rss2 puts out cd data.

rss works well but limits the content.

you can just as easily use mysql to php to format
the formatting as a result will be richer and can be treated
as loadvars as opposed to loadxml