* FFF Media's fCMS
Content management systems have been featured here in the Network World on Web Applications newsletter quite a few times, but today’s CMS is a little different from the others.
fCMS from FFF Media is a Flash CMS component that allows text, images and Flash Movies (SWF files) to be updated directly on a live Flash Web site through a browser window with all changes being applied at runtime.
To begin editing, the user simply clicks on the Flash movie and enters “admin” which pops up a login dialog (you can also create an “admin” button that directly brings up the login dialog). Once the user is authenticated the editable regions in the Flash movie are highlighted.
Clicking in a textfield brings up a WYSIWYG editor with a customizable font list, font sizes, and color palette while clicking in an editable image or SWF area brings up a content selection and attributes dialog and includes auto sizing, auto fit, positioning and captions.
The system operation is clever: A back-end fCMS server application (IIS on Microsoft Windows 2000 or higher and Apache on UNIX or Linux) receives edits generated by authenticated fCMS front ends embedded in Flash movies that are running in browsers. The server application then directly modifies the Flash content on the server.
Security is handled through a hidden XML file containing user names and passwords that is referenced by the fCMS back end when the user logs in to the fCMS client. This file also defines individual content upload, delete and access privileges.
To add fCMS functionality to Flash content you need to install the fCMS extension under Flash 8 using the Macromedia Extension Manager. After that when you build Flash content and you want to add an text field or image to be managed by fCMS you create a layer and drag the fCMSMaster component onto the stage. You then select the frame range over which fCMS should apply.
Then to create editable text regions you just drag the new component named TextSatellite from the components panel and drop it on a multiline dynamic textfield. You use a slightly different process for images and SWFs: You just drag and drop the ImageSatellite component onto the stage.
Flash movies that use fCMS will work in Flash Player 7 or 8 but to be able edit requires a browser with Flash Player 8 installed.
The beauty of fCMS for users is that it is incredibly simple to use – just load the site in a browser, log in and edit.
The one deficiency of fCMS is that only free form text fields are supported. There is a definite need to support text fields with mandatory formatting such as telephone numbers and dates – particularly useful when the field data might be intended to be used as parameters for Actionscript.
fCMS is a unique system that is very reasonably priced at $149.95.
*** CORRECTION: The final paragraph of last week’s newsletter about InfoStreet’s StreetSmart contained some errors. The corrected paragraph, which contains pricing information, can be seen here. We apologize for the error.
