Last time, I had the pleasure of reviewing Flashloaded on Tubetorial. In that review, I took a look at the big picture. I talked about an overview of Flashloaded, particularly with it's ready-made scripts for publishers whose sites run on Flash.
This time around, I am focusing on one of Flashloaded's ready-made Flash components, the fCMS, a Flash-based content management system. In the previous review, I simply used the freely available demonstrations, and as well as the trial versions. This time, I'm fortunate to have my hands on an actual copy of fCMS.
As an overview, fCMS is:
The fCMS is a Flash CMS component (Flash Content Management System) that allows you to update text, images and SWFs directly on a live Flash website without ever leaving your browser window. The website developer or their client has no need for a separate administration panel for managing the content of the website and all of the changes can be applied at runtime.
In short, fCMS lets publishers update content directly through a Web browser using a Flash-based interface. fCMS also lets publishers edit or update Flash content without the need for any added software aside from their Web browsers. This makes it easy for end-users, particularly those who may not necessarily have access to client-side Flash-authoring software, to edit content.
To expound, here are some of the highlighted features of fCMS.
- Direct updating of content on a live Flash website
- No client training required. As easy to use as a word processor
- Editable textfields with built-in text editor (allows for multi-page textfields)
- Updatable images and SWFs - includes auto size, auto fit, positioning and captions
- Customizable font list, font size list and color palette
- Hidden login - type blindly a predefined word to access the CMS
- Allows for multiple users with different file upload permissions
- All data stored in an XML file - suitable for small so medium website content (no database required)
- No end user coding or HTML knowledge required
- Easy to use and customize
- Secure - username and password are securely stored on the server side only
- Light weight - adds only up to 20kb to your Flash movies
You can play around with a working demo of fCMS at the Flashloaded fCMS component sample page. From there, you are able to edit the text on the sample website just by clicking on it--and a Flash-based text-editor will be launched on your browser. You can even change the website images by uploading a new image, and editing it within your browser.
Installing Flashloaded fCMS should be a breeze if you are familiar with uploading scripts to your webhost, and editing XML files. You simply upload the back-end files to your server (Linux/Unix or Windows are supported) with edited config files. What's great with fCMS is that you don't need to set up database tables, nor do you need to set it up with a database at all. It uses XML to store settings on the server, such as user accounts and other data.
Then to use Flashloaded fCMS on your Flash content, you set-up the front-end by incorporating the fCMS extension file into your Macromedia Extension Manager. From there you can already apply Flashloaded fCMS on your Flash-based movies or websites, as explained on the fCMS userguide.
This is assuming you meet the minimum requirements of Flashloaded fCMS, which means you should have either Macromedia Flash MX 2004, Flash 8 (standard or professional) or Adobe Flash CS3 for authoring (Windows or Mac). Content using fCMS may be published for either Flash Player 7, 8 or 9, or ActionScript 2.0.
Flashloaded fCMS is reasonably priced at $149.95 per website. This is reasonable enough, considering that the software is readily available and easy to install and customize. No need to pay big bucks for a developer to write code from scratch.
