Nowadays flash users are constantly looking for powerful flash CMS(Content Management System) solutions that makes the development of flash websites much easier and faster.  More than that such software does not require flash programming skills and everyone can build and update flash website .

In this brief article we want to introduce one of the most promising content management systems for flash xml flip book engine Megazine 3D. The software is produced by FancyCMS under FancyFlip label and demo version will be available till the 1st of August 2010.

The software provides user with convenient and powerful interface allowing to control all aspects of your website. The application comes with built in ftp client that helps to publish flash site without any additional 3rd parties software. Another interesting feature is pdf 2 swf converter which imports pdf files, converts them and publish as flash website. Also you can create your flip book from a set of jpeg, png or gif files. Advanced tools give you full control over flip book interface design. You can change background, navigation icons and much more.

Please take a few minutes to download FancyFlip demo, we believe you will find this software really helpful.

I would love to share some of my sales experience through different flash market places, this article is a brief and unprejudiced report about the sales results I made through some websites selling flash files of other authors as well.  In this post I will compare only Flashcomponents.net and flashmint.com . I submitted some of my files to other websites as well but flashden rejected all of them, buystockflash.com generated only one sale during 6!!!!! month, templates.com never got back to me to respond.

So here what I have. At the moment I have 47% commission plan as a non exclusive author at flashcomponents.net and 35% at flashmint.com with the same non exclusive terms.

Here is some information regarding Advanced XML Driven Template

Sales Number         Template Cost      Revenue

FMint.com                                          23                                   50                       $402.5

FComponents.net                            28                                   20                      $263.2

As you see flashmint.com makes less sales but due to sufficiently higher bid my revenue was almost twice better, though flashcomponents.net attracts more customers due to lower price policies. Both of market places have one really big advantage which is developers friendly policy, these guys are not looking for reasons to reject your design but look for opportunities to help the designer make product better and sell items safely.

The net is full of web blogs but it’s pretty difficult to find something worth reading. Very often people just post bullshit like “50 best websites you ever seen” or “10 best practices of doing some crap” and so on. I would understand if some modest blog like mine would do that. But it’s a shame when giants with dozens of professional copyrighters like smashingmagazine or hongkiat are posting this crap just to keep posting something. Ok, so we start a rating of most useless articles that were created by design gurus. Hope we all enjoy and laugh.

In this post I want to share some of my observations and ideas regarding the development of flash templates industry. More and more I meet articles stating that Adobe Flash technology has no future and it will be totally substituted by HTML5. I think that the word that describes this statement the best is “bullshit”. We have already heard same about Ajax, jQuerey , now it’s HTML5 turn.

I was always wondering why people use Macs instead of PCs. It’s more expensive, less functional, more proprietary. The trick is in white plastic and the fact people just feel happy sitting in front of nice box with smooth lines thinking they are possessing a piece of art. They think it’s beautiful. Same thing with Adobe Flash technology. Who cares that Adobe Flash in passed 3 years turned into programming monster which it was never supposed to be. Nobody cares it is not SEO friendly, it’s damn expensive and extremely difficult to update for average user. No one cares until it’s beautiful. That’s the main reason why Flash will survive and beat all sorts of new coming HTML6, 7, 10….

Now lets take a look at major industry players. I would say that in passed 2-3 years they divided into 2 “teams “competing with each other and every member of the team. So these teams are large template providers like TemplateMonster, FlashMint, CBMCard on one hand and flash stock websites like FlashComponents, ActiveDen, iStockPhoto and some other less popular website on other hand.  Flash Stock websites provide relatively high quality and extremely inexpensive flash products appealing to many customers. These products are provided by freelance designers(like me) and as a rule cost in the range of $20-35 which is twice less than the most inexpensive product at templatemonster for example. In their turn flash template providers can give the customer much better technical support, wider range of services and complex flash product that will never be developed by single designer or flash developer. Good examples of such products are:

FlashMint CMS, MintEditor(desktop application for flash xml site editing)

TemplateMonster FlashMotor CMS, some intros with content management system.

CBMCard Admin templates for photo and video portals.

Thus it’s pretty difficult to judge who’s gonna be the winner, but one thing is for sure – fair competition gives premium quality, monopoly brings lack of quality and support.

Another fact which is getting more and more obvious is that the future of the industry is in Flash content management systems. The customers don’t want to buy expensive software and edit tons of ActionScript code. Every one wants simple and intuitive admin interface allowing to make all necessary changes to the templates. FlashMint was the 1st to introduce CMS for flash templates, after that templatemonster created flex based dynamic galleries(pretty awkward solution) and now they are promoting their next generation of flash CMS - FlashMoto CMS Templates. FancyCMS boasts to launch brand new advanced flash CMS with full e-commerce support, flash SEO support and extended site management features. Let’s hold on and see, but I am sure it’s only the beginning of long and exciting fight.

SWFAddress is a small JavaScript Library allowing to generate unique URLs for the pages f your Flash or Ajax based website and thus easily add deep linking. Using this powerful utility you can refresh flash pages, enable browser back and forward buttons, bookmark flash links, sent them by email, share and much more.

SWFAddress script was tested on such browsers as Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, Safari, Opera.

Skilled flash developer can make Flash website much more  SEO friendly using this JavaScript utility. Every virtual link of your flash site can have its unique URL and page title. The fact that sfw address can handle 404 Error is extremely important for flash documents search engine optimization. You will need Apache 1.3+ web server and PHP4+ for that. SWF Address is compatible with all versions of ActionScript. Even SWISH Max2 is fully compatible with SWF Address library due toActionScript 1.0 based sample developed by Larry Benedict.

Here is the lis of best samples of SWFAddress 2.4 implementation

http://www.cocacolazero.com/

http://www.warnerbros.com/

http://www.porsche.com/all/usa/911/

http://www.26000vodka.com/

http://auroraflash.org/blog/?p=202

This article is aimed at flash developers and designers having collection of flash files and willing to get some extra cash selling them on-line. I will do my best to bring you fair and unprejudiced flash stocks overview based on my personal observations.  So lets get started…

At the moment there are about 20+ more or less significant websites selling stock flash files. In my opinion the most important are:

www.activeden.net (prior known as flashden.net)

www.flashcomponents.net

www.flashmint.com

www.flashscope.com

www.buystockflash.com

The rest of the stock websites seem to be either confusing and awkward copies of flashden(I mean flashdo.com and flashmarketplace.com ) or indistinct and suspicious websites looking more like subsidiary projects of big companies than really a place where you can sell flash stuff(the templates.com which is templatemonster’s parody for a market place). I bet you won’t make many sales if you try to sell flash through these websites, if they accept your products at all. So I just recommend not to waist your time. Now let’s get back to real flash stock websites and take a closer look.

Activeden(flashden) is the most well know and popular flash stock so far. Their project is the most successful and I truly admire their business model and people who administer the project. Activeden offers great commission rate for exclusive authors, you can get up to 70% per sale. Though to reach this amount you have to make really lot’s of sales. The thing I don’t like about Activeden is fixed 25% commission rate for non exclusive authors and they won’t change, it no way. I believe it’s not fair, but the guys want to keep the content of their website unique. Being the leader in the industry of stock flash they can really persuade most of the authors to join exclusively. The company is located in Australia and besides Activeden owns about a dozen of other very successful projects. I think they are really trustworthy company that can be both admired, respected and envied

Flashcomponents.net is another company dedicated to bringing top quality flash components, both professional and free. They make probably less sales than flashden but their policy to non exclusive authors is much more appealing. I think it’s a good approach when you are not tight up with damn 25% and can sell flash files anywhere else. I am selling some of my flash files and xml templates through this company as well and pretty happy with the support and the terms in general. If you are planning to start selling flash components I would recommend you to start with flashcomponents.net. The company is located in Romania, the support managers are very friendly and nice people.

Flashmint.com is one more marketplace where you can sell buy flash components and CMS flash templates. They do not parade the fact they work with 3rd parties developers and usually contact serious flash developers with the cooperation offer. I was pretty surprised when I got an invitation message from them. You can get 40% commission per sale. Thing that I like the most about flashmint is that they handle all customers support requests by themselves. When you have a hundred of files being sold through 3 companies technical support  turns into nightmare. When selling flash through flashmint you can just forget about the support and once per month get your commission, it’s convenient as for me. Flashmint is owned and operated by US company.

Flashscope.com is pretty young but promising marketplace and I was really impressed by their support team and conditions for non exclusive authors who can get up to 60% per sale. In general they are growing very active and my sales are getting better and better.  Flashscope is US based company, if you are selling flash files non exclusively probably their conditions would be the best.

Buystockflash is nice stock website to sell and buy flash. It’s a nice, clean and usable website operated by Ukrainian company located in Kyiv. Once they were inspired by flashden and created a similar network of websites. They give amazing 50-75% for authors and the customers can buy flash files starting from $1. Russian and Ukrainian users can buy the templates using WebMoney – very popular payment system in Eastern Europe.

Which company to join you may ask? I would advise to join all of them and monetize your talent as much as you can. If you don’t make much money at least you will promote your website

How to update content in Artin2ition Components-Based series Templates.

1. General Settings
All general setting like site title, slogan logo, background image/animation or sound track can be managed by
means of editing /data/config.xml file
To change the title of the website find this line
<title><![CDATA[<font face="PF Handbook Pro" size="50" color="#ffffff" letterspacing="-1" >GLOBEX</font><font face="PF Handbook Pro Thin" size="50" color="#dcdbde" letterspacing="-3"> CO. </font>]]></title>
It sets the font, size and the color of company name “GLOBEX CO”
To change the slogan you should find “slogan” tag and edit it’s content
<slogan><![CDATA[PROTECTING YOUR INTERESTS]]></slogan>
To modify the logo simply copy png image of your logo into /images folder and specify the path to the image. To disable the logo you set the logo enabled parameter to “0″
<logo enable=”1″  path=”images/logo.png”/> Please notice that it’s imporatnt to save logo image in png or gif format to preserve the transparacy.
Background and music tags specify the path to background image and the sound track. It is very important to remember that you can use swf animation as a background of your website. This makes the site much more eyecatching. We recommend to use animated logo or company name as a background.
To change the copyright in the footer of the website you should edit “year” tag
<year><![CDATA[ɠCOPYRIGHT 2010 GLOBEX CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED]]></year>

2. Menu Structure
Menu_items.xml file defines the structure of your menu Lets check this example
<item caption=”COMPANY” _img=”images/menu_Img1.png”  > this line creates drop down menu item with 3 sub menus and specifies the path to the images assigned to this menu.
<item caption=”CONTENT PAGE 1″  link=”content/flash.swf” path_data =”content/content1.xml” path_images =”content/” /> – creates 1st menu item called “content page 1″ and tells to load /content/flash.swf component and take texts and settings from file /content/content1.xml
<item caption=”CONTENT PAGE 2″  link=”content/flash.swf” path_data =”content/content2.xml” path_images =”content/” />
<item caption=”CONTENT PAGE 3″  link=”content/flash.swf” path_data =”content/content3.xml” path_images =”content/” />
</item> – end of drop down menu
In general you can create as many menu items as you need, their number is onli limited with the design and commen sence.
3. Contact forms
To get the feed back from your visitors you should adjust the contact form. Your server must support PHP and mail(); function must be enabled. Open email.php file and change the dummy email address to your own which exists. After that you should open contact.xml file and insert the text displayed at the contact form page, usually it’s the address of your office and phone numbers.
4. Other Components
Other components are pretty easy to edit, every component has .xml file with the setting that usually defines texts and paths to the images displayed at the page.

History
Component Based series of templates initially were created to organize multiple corporate flash presentation in one document or website.
Later we added some features and turned them into full functional websites which have some pretty serious advantages. Using our templates you can
create 2 level menu structure, add unlimited number of pages based on our components and flash files created by 3rd parties users. Integration of
ecommerce flash shopping cart component allows to start your online business in 10 minutes. And what is the most important so far is that you are
not supposed to be experienced flash user to create your own website and update content. Though if you need to make some serious changes like
color scheme editing or fonts substitution you will have to get a copy of Adobe Flash  CS3 or higher and spend some time reading Flash manuals.

Here is the last template that can be purchased at www.flashcomponents.net www.flashscope.com and www.flashmint.com

Yesterday we have finished testing of new cool flash component – flash ecommerce shopping cart. This powerful and easy to use tool allows you to upgrade your old websites  with robust and customizable shopping cart software. And of course you can integrate it into your brand new websites.

Which is more important the product is 100% compatible with our Website Builder Templates(distributed through flashmint.com) and SWFPlus templates(distributed through flashcomponents.net). Anyway, you’d better see it for yourself! Here are the screenshots:

As always your comments are more than welcome!

XML template 2612 demonstrates how dynamic flash intro can dramatically improve interactivity of your website. If you take a closer look you’ll notice that we modified xml template 2563. We changed the colors, modified menu structure and customized the template to look like a car dealer website. It took about 2 hours, most of the time was spent on images search and thumbnails cropping.

The thing that differs this template from previous versions is the usage of dynamic intro component. As we have told before this tool allows to create dynamic xml presentations with unlimited number of frames. The only thing required to create nice intro advertising your product or service is your imagination.

This templates has to demonstrate that customizing XML flash site is really easy and you do not have to be a flash guru or have any special skills at all. In fact anyone can do that.