What are the benefits of Flashpress?

There are things which Flash does very well, particularily interactivity and branded user experience, which the php / css platform of WordPress has a hard time replicating. By the same token, the strengths of state of the art publishing platform known overlap very closely with the weaknesses of Flash. It is user friendly, easy to install, update and extend. The tagline for Flashpress is better than any description I could give, “Briding the best of both worlds. Imagine if you could easily update flash and provide a WordPress installation with the interactive experience that only Flash could offer”.

Understanding how Flashpress works

For those who are already excited by the prospect of this plugin, there is a flash slideshow on Brendan’s site that explains the process in detail. At a high-level, the process which the will be executed when a user requests a page from a site using this plugin is:

• Flashpress requests XML data from WordPress
• WordPress retrieves the data from the database
• Flashpress sends that XML data to Flash
• Flash both creates an instance of the page template and loads the data into it
• The interactive elements are then applied and a user can initiate another action
• The cycle gets repeated

I sent Brendan a series of questions by e-mail that he was kind enough to take the time to answer to get more information out about Flashpress, its history, status and future.

When / how did you come up with the idea to write a completely new front-end user interface for WordPress in Flash?

Just over a year ago, I decided to start a PHP user group in Toronto. There was no functioning group, and I had over 90 students in my PHP class at Seneca (School of Communications Arts, Digital Media Arts Program), and many were excited to be a part of this. We had a few meetings and were looking for a project to get it all started. I had mentioned we should do some WordPress plugins, because all my students where familiar with since I was teaching WordPress development in class. At the same time I was getting this user group (UG) together, I was still very involved in the Flash community, and thought about ways I could more designers interested in WordPress…and then….it just came to me…what if I merge Flash and WordPress togther, then I can get the best of both worlds.

So, I discussed it with my students, they liked the sound of. I and suggested that we take it one step further and build and entire Flash site using WordPress as the backend cms.  This is one of the major problems in the Flash industry. It costs a lot to develop a site in Flash and then it costs almost as much to maintain it. A lot of our students go freelance and want to build Flash, but can’t get smaller clients to pay. So I thought this could be the answer. Make it easy to update and manage. Plus, we bridge two worlds, open source and commercial projects, and we get more developers and designers to work together. Which is PHUG’s philosophy. Any ways, long story short I came up with the name FlashPress and it eventually became a PHUG project.

The primary developers for the plugin now are Alex Nasser and Logan Aube (from www.bogaroo.com)

What is the status of the project? How much is WordPress 2.7 affecting the development?

This is an interesting question. WP has changed many times since the inception of FlashPress. However, most changes have been made to the look and feel of the dashboard, security issues, and better management of content. Luckily, they have not changed the DB architecture or core files enough, and some cases not at all, to affect FlashPress. 2.7 is a different story, there are some changes that may affect development, but at this point it has not been an issue. we will continue to develop along the same roadmap, and we are ready to distribute it, we figure people will contribute to areas they feel have not yet been covered. Like any good open source project, we will never be finished.

How much customization will one be able to do to the UI? How much flash will one have to know?

This has always been a big topic of debate for us. Initially the project was geared mostly towards Flash developers. This is for 2 reasons:

1. We felt there was a greater need in the Flash community for a Flash driven CMS.
2. Most of the code to make this work is AS. We have had to write many custom AS libraries to get WordPress to communicate with Flash the way we want it to. The PHP end was simple, WP only needed a couple lines of code to pass date to Flash, however, Flash requires more, we need to parse all the incoming data, re-organize it, and make sure it is displayed correctly.

Now to answer your question, We have decided that it would be best for this project to be accessible for both Flash and WordPress developers, meaning, we are trying very hard to ensure that as a WP developer, you will not have to play with the AS in Flash, unless they want to. It will be mostly design work and everything can be handled in WP. However, we want to make sure that both ends of the app are open source, so that either a Flash or WP developer can extend the AS and PHP to add more functionality. We have discussed heading in an interesting direction, allowing contributors on both ends to continue developemt and meet somewhere in the middle for the final distribution. It also depends which community picks up on this more.

Could this also be used to build a UI in Flex since they compile to the same native code base?

Yes! In fact currently most of development team have been using Flex and FlashDevelop. We tend not stay out of the Flash IDE. The idea is to make completely open source accessible.

What functionality will be in version 1.0? What is on the whiteboard fo version 2.0?

Version 1 is essentially going to cover all the basics. You will be able to use FlashPress to generate and manage all content in a Flash site. So, this means the ability to create, edit, and manage all
pages, posts, and media. Version 2, will be a whole new bundle. It will hopefully allow for anything Flash and Wp related. This willl also depend on our contributors and the success of our community and project.

A key element on the whiteboard for version 2 is a complete installable bundle. This will have all the necessities, including plugins, special modules, sample sites, .flas and so on. We want FlashPress to be as easy to download, install, and run, as WP is now. One other things to mention: We are hoping to add some really cool open source flash tools to the bundle. The abbility to easily create red5 apps, papervision3d development, and AIR.

If anyone wants to learn more about FlashPress, PHUG are running FREE workshops about it – schedule details are available through the PHUG website or workshops.phug.ca. Presenters will upload their presentations and files there for those who miss the chance to attend. Plus this gives people the ability to continue to talk about it and share. You can also get more info at flashpressdevelopers.com

A big thanks very much for taking the time both to answer my questions and instigate the development of such a great plugin. I look forward to being able to use it when it’s launched.