Chapter 1. Flash with Drupal

It is no secret that the web sites that become the most popular on the Web are those which possess a series of traits that appeal to the masses; most prominently, content and beauty. Because of this trend, many web developers strive to produce sites that are not only beautiful, but also rich in content. In order to satisfy the beauty requirement, Flash has easily risen to the top as being an ideal portal to deliver dynamic and beautiful web experiences to its users. At the same time, with the explosion of content on the Internet, Drupal has stood out, among other content management systems, as a powerful and expandable means to manage content. It only seems natural, then, to combine these two incredible technologies together to create the ultimate user experience.

In this book, we will learn how to integrate Flash with Drupal by taking a hands-on approach to building real-life Flash applications for Drupal CMS. Each chapter will introduce a different and more difficult challenge, where we will continually build onto the skills learned from the previous chapters. It is my goal, that by the end of this book, you should be able to venture off on your own and build your very own Flash applications that integrate beautifully with Drupal. But before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to take a step back and understand the motivation for this book. We also need to touch base on some of the basics for integrating Flash with Drupal, which include: