I made 4 Flash sites with ZenPhoto

reef

Hi,

I recently finished my fourth website built with a combination of Flash and ZenPhoto and I thought it would perhaps be helpful to explain how I did this.

First of all: I would rather not like to go in to a discussion whether Flash should be used at all. This is always a hot (and very valid) topic and recently a lot of fuel has been added to the fire. But this is not the place. Personally as a designer I am moving away from Flash but for these projects I still found it to be the best fitting solution.

Secondly: Thanks for ZenPhoto! It is a great solution for managing photos and content and the support on this forum was very helpful.

The projects I worked on were all portfolios for photographers so ZenPhoto was an obvious fit. Especially with the integration of ZenPage. I choose to combine it with Flash to create more fluid transitions.

All the site use the same basic zenphoto theme and Flash framework but each have a different Flash theme on top. Integrating Flash and ZenPhoto is actually quite simple. Instead of serving a html page with photo the theme serves a xml file to Flash with all the required data.

To make sure the site is also usable without Flash (or for search engines) the theme also has an html part. To retreive the xml an extra parameter is added and a different php file is used. It was not difficult to set up (and I am by no means a php wizard).

The sites are:
http://jeroentoirkens.com
http://nomadslife.com (a project by Jeroen Toirkens)
http://jiribuller.nl
http://rhalda.nl

If you have any questions just post them here and I'll do my best to answer them.

Bob

acrylian

Although not being a Fash fan for various reasons we won't discuss here, I have to say these are actually flash sites how they should be done if they are done. Only Flash where applicable, quite fast loading and linkable subpages.

Maybe it would be an idea if you would write a tutorial about integrating Zenphoto and Flash on your site? We could then link to that from our user guide for example.

I take these also as submissions to our showcase gallery.

reef

A tutorial might be a good idea but might take a while as I first have to finish my own site :-)
I'll see what the response is on this forum.

acrylian

Ok, hopefully that site will be run at least partly by Zenphoto as well (yeah, I know that finishing issue, look at my profile link..;-))

fretzl

@reef: Well...the response is very positive :-)
Beautiful sites !!
A tutorial would be much appreciated.

olihar

One of the best uses of flash I have seen in a long time, would love to hear more about the process.

reef

Thanks for the comments. I'll go and write a tutorial then :-)

Keep in mind it will take a while ;-)

In the meantime if you have any specific question just post them.