Flashblocks Flash CMS Component
(Flash Content Management System)

Greetings,
I'm trying to decide if FlashBlocks is the right fit for my projects, any advice would be very helpful, & thank you in advance.

I do pretty much everything dynamically, as an example let's say :

I'm making a site that has a portfolio viewer which consists of a black bar (height:200 pixels, width:500 pixels, alpha:50%), & on top of that black bar will be a horizontal list of thumbnailed images. I'm creating the black bar dynamically using the drawing API, & I'm attaching the thumbnails via XML dynamically, which brings me to my question :

Is it required that an object be on the stage in order to be editable? Can I edit the contents of a dynamically created Movie Clip (using createEmptyMovieClip())?
Also, each page of the site is also created this way - is it possible to modify the content of Contact Page, for example, even though there is nothing physically on the stage at authoring time?

Also, using the "black bar thumbnails" from above as an example, how would I add a new item to my portfolio being that there's nothing physically on the stage - i.e. how do I associate a new image with that thumbnail viewer, as well as set the thumbnail to display the associated full size image when clicked??

You can attach Flashblocks, Mediablock and the Editblock components all via actionscript.

Here is an example of creating a Mediablock and attaching an Editblock to it with Actionscript

Code: :

createClassObject(flashblocks.Mediablock, "pic2", 1, {targetMC:holder.txt,_width:300,_height:300}); createClassObject(flashblocks.Editblock, "pic2_eb", 2, {targetMC:pic2});

Wow, great to know! & thanks for the quick response :)

Please allow me to expand a bit on my question :

In looking at the images below -
I have a flash file where I'm creating a thumbnail viewer as depicted by the top image below - the black rectangle is the background bar, & the white boxes represent image thumbnails. Using FlashBlocks would I somehow be able to add an image to my thumbnail viewer to achieve the result as depicted in the bottom image (the red square being the newly added image) - in other words, do I need to use a FlashBlocks component, or can I turn any Movie Clip into an editable element? Also, can I define what happens when those images are clicked, such as having the new image completely fill the background of the site?

Currently I'm using XML to build an array of the images, then I build the black bar using the drawing API in Flash (inside an emptyMovieClip), then I'm using a For Loop based on the array length to createEmptyMovieClip() & load each thumbnail image into it, then use math to space them out appropriately, so technically there's really nothing on the stage at authoring time - would I be able to do it this way using FlashBlocks - or what, if anything - would I have to change about the method I'm currently using? I notice similar components used in several of the "user sites", & I wonder about the possibilities of using my own elements, for example a custom-created ScrollBar system (simply a Movie Clip with code in it)

In theory, I'm hoping that I can somehow right-click that black bar field, have it upload an image & dump it into some kind of XML, which will in turn feed it into the array I'm creating as above, & it will automatically be attached by the For Loop...Could it be that easy, or are there certain components/methods/restrictions that I must adhere to? Or is there a much simpler method using FlashBlocks' components/methods?! :)
Thank you so much.

You may use pure Actionscript and Flashblocks; this is not a problem. You may use Flashblocks to edit your external XML file; that is fine as well.

You may also wish to use the Mediablock component (instead of images) as the MB can create resized images dynamically for you.
http://flashblocks.com/FlashblocksML/ReadMe.php#componentMB

And take a look at the gallery module, that comes with Flashblocks demo site, for some ideas.
http://flashblocks.com/FlashblocksML/ReadMe.php#modulesGallery