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

In this article I would like to introduce you to MegaZine3 Page Flip Engine – awesome product created by German flash developers. Why MegaZine3? This powerful flash page flip engine has a long row of advantages over similar flash products. The most significant are – open source codes, 100% AS3 based coding, lots of additional flash plugins, even basic version allows to include different types of web content like video, photo galleries, text pages and much more. And maybe the most important point for many customers – you are not supposed to be experienced flash user to create your own flip book website and add your content.

Ok, now let’s take a closer look at flash page flip site engine.

Extreme easy of use.

Thought Megazine3 is unbelievably powerful and extensible flash product, creating full flash site based on this flipbook is really easy task even for the beginner. You can create simple flip book website using just 3 lines of XML:

<book plugins=”batchpages“>
<chapter pages=”path/to/images/page_image[10].jpg”/>
</book>

These 3 lines create flip book consisting of 10 jpg images using page_image1.jpg through using page_image1.jpg files.

Demo version.

Probably the easies way to make sure Megazine3 rocks is to take a look at demo version of this open source flash flipbook. There are thousands of websites on the Net using this flash engine and dozens of companies developing sophisticated plugings adding more powerful and useful features to this product.  For example one of the tool allows to convert PDF document into flash flip book website.

Search Engine Optimization.

Megazine3 Flash engine comes SEO prepared right out of the box. It has built in support of SWFaddress which allows to create separate URLs and Titles for every single flash page of your website. Besides that SWFAddres is JavaScript library allowing to open every fage of flash movie with the unique URL, it’s extremely important for flash SEO. It’s really nice that flash developers considered this aspect beforehand and added vitally important SWF Address support.

Navigation Panel.

Site navigation is very important for your visitors. Magazine Flip Book automaticaly creates page preview thumbnails and add them to the main navigation panel with a direct link to the page.  All buttons used in navigation panel are stored in external png files so you can always edit them and add your own look and feel to your flash site. Recently professional flip book templates were added to flashmint collection. Now you can easily get professional design created specially for flash page flip website, though you can turn on your creativity and design your own.

Multilingual support.

Very often you have to provide site content in several languages. As a rule the development of such websites is expensive and pretty complex. Megazine3 comes with built in multilingual support making things much easier. You should just create xml settings files for your optional languages and you have professional flash site with multilingual support.

Licensing.

As we have mentioned before Megazine Flip book is distributed free of charge with open source codes which can be used for unlimited period for your personal or testing purposes. Nevertheless if you are wiling to use this product for commercial purposes you have to purchase a license. In my opinion the licensing scheme Megazine offers is pretty unclear and complicated so you really need to apply some efforts just to find out what type of licensing suits your needs. You can read more about it here .

Regardless of some unclear licensing terms the product is very well documented and it wont be difficult to master the manual for any unexperienced user. Wiki page provides detailed documentation and covers both general engine settings and detailed plugin descriptions.

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

This is the secont part of the post regarding the perspectives of e-commerce flash solutions. Here I am planning to give a short overview of market demands and some technical aspects.

Who may want flash shopping cart?

Before the development of flash shopping cart it would be a good point to make some sort of market research and find out who may want flash shopping cart and what are the major demands to the software.  According to our internal company statistics the customers interested in flash ecommerce solutions may be the retailers of home appliance, cell phones, computers, clothes, food, beverages and all the range of things that can be easily delivered by post services Like FedEx of DHL or whatever. Also we should not forget about digital goods, online services and photographers. So as you see the number of  potential customers is really huge. I would assume that online shops, delivery services and big stock shops all together will make the life of supermarkets really hard pretty soon.

Technical Demands to the final product.

Now let’s outline some technical, design and usability demands. As we aim at small and middle business we should realize that flash shopping cart must be very cost effective, easy to install-run-update, customizable and inexpensive solution. To avoid additional software expenses we recommend to use XML data feeds to store information about the products and shopping cart design settings. This allows not to involve qualified personnel with web design experience to install and customize flash shopping cart software. Also XML feeds allow to store relatively extensive arrays of information and to process them robust.  To keep the cost of the product as low as possible we recommend to use ecommerce flash templates or even better ecommerce flash components which can be integrated into any existing flash based or css based website.  Using flash components gives a chance to keep the initial expenses at the level of $30-70 which is more than affordable in comparison with custom solutions.

As a conclusion we may say that the most effective flash e-commerce solution is XML driven flash cart component  that can be integrated into any existing website.

Possible Architecture.

At the moment we have several ideas regarding general architecture of ecommerce flash website. The 1^st and less expensive variant will be so called “components based flash website” which consists of the main core that loads all pages together and defines general look and feel and the pages itself. These flash site pages will be usual components with dynamic content, 1 component per 1 page. Such flash websites will cost in the range of 30-50 USD, the admin panel won’t be included.

Another more expensive yet functional variant will include advanced flash CMS for content and sales management and complex structure based on XML data files. The prototype of such flash ecommerce solutions may be FancyCMS and ReadyPhotosite engine(in fact it was created for the photographers but can be easily reconfigured for other purposes).

General Conclusion. Our team believes that in the nearest future we will see lot’s of Flash E-commerce site engines and the competition will be really rough. Same events we predicted in our reviews of Flash CMS Websites and if you are following up the topic you can notice that 99% of our assumptions  were correct.

More and more we have customers who want to create ecommerce flash website. Until now we had to refuse cause we find it outrageous to sell useless things. Here is the list of reasons we had:

1. Flash was not SEO friendly enough which is vital for ecommerce site.
2. There was no Flash CMS good enough to manage and update such websites.
3. The development of custom ecommerce flash cart was too expensive and had all glitches I’ve already mentioned.

Since recently things have changed a lot, in this article I just want to share some of my thoughts regarding flash shopping cart advantages and drawbacks. This part tells about SEO, CMS, general advantages of Flash Technology.

The main advantage of Flash technology drawing all extra attention and bringing Adobe tons of cash is the interactivity. Flash websites bring unique opportunity to “show out” and have an advantage over the competitors. Being innovative is really important for any business. This is what makes our clients look for new solutions for the online shops. Yes, old good OsCommerce has all required features except one really important. They do not impress the customer any more. So if you are looking for the solution that makes the customer say WOW! then professional and interactive flash shopping cart is just what you need.

One of the biggest problems Flash had was poor search engines optimization ability. Since the 1^st of July, 2008 Adobe states that swf files are searchable. This was really important step which will definitely change the web for good. In SWF Searchability FAQ you can read full text to find out why Adobe, Google and Yahoo work together now.  Also since the deep linking is now available for Flash, the developers can now play with the URLs and the titles. This means that due to implementation of SWFaddress 2.4 every single page in flash document now can have it’s own URL and document title(displayed in the top of the browser and very important for search engines).  All together these factors solve the issue of SE Optimization for ecommerce flash websites.

The problem of Flash CMS for e-commerce still exists. According to my casual observations none of the companies created full functional content management system for e-commerce flash solutions yet. To say the truth, many of flash developers are working in this direction, but the results are insignificant I would say.

Here is the list of the websites providing e-commerce flash templates, or sort of…

www.flashcart.com – boasts to provide full functional flash shopping cart with the support of Authorize.net and PayPal gateways and a full suite of tools required for online shop management. Unfortunately I was not able to find any of live examples or demos demonstration the cart, neither at the website nor on the Net.

www.myflashcart.com – according to the description the shopping cart is completely integrated with PayPal and can be customized to match the color scheme of your site.  No information/demo were provided  regarding the backend and integration with PayPal API.

www.flashmint.com – provides 2 types of e-commerce flash templates. The 1^st type of templates comes without the admin panel and the second one which is called CMSv3 has very limited ecommerce features and can be barely called shopping cart. In fact you can purchase only 1 item at a time. Both of the products support PayPal payment gateway.

www.flashden.net offers one more simple yet pretty customizable ecommerce solution, Of course it won’t work for big website but if you are running small business maybe it’s just what you are looking for. Just like other shopping cart this one has the support of PayPal and you can play with the colors. Unfortunately CMS is not included, though I would not even expect it for $17 bucks.

www.fancycms.com is one of the most promising Flash CMS solutions so far. These guys are developing impressive flex based admin panel with premium class flash front end, and which is more important their websites are equipped with ecommerce features right out of the box. According to the release notes the website comes with full functional shopping cart and the admin panel allowing to track sales. Once again the cart works with PayPal only…and as usual there is no delivery calculator which is a big disadvantage in comparison with oscommerce or zencart for example.

http://www.xmlflashcart.com is the last decent flash cart I was able to find. Just like FabcyCMS it provides all required features (like item size, color and other options), it has nice intuitive interface and works with PayPal.

We are really happy to have so many visitors with nice ideas who help us create useful flash tools One of these visors is Rita Bish who gave us a brilliant idea to create simple and very useful flash component – XML driven flash guest book.
As you probably know part of our team is working on creating super flexible flash CMS(I wrote about it about couple of month ago, the name of the project is fancycms). So we have created tons of cool flash components, part of them will be distributed apart from the CMS as a stand alone flash apps. One of these components is a newsletter http://fancycms.com/demo/fashion/#/news/our-news-1
We just decided to modify it and launch in 2 variants as newsletter and flash guestbook. Of course it will come with a rich set of features allowing to moderate posts easily and filter spam messages. Hope you enjoy it. And as usual flash component will be available at Flashcomponents.net , flashmint.com and maybe activeden.net
Approximate price is in something between 10-15 USD

As I promised a couple of days before here you can see some samples of Aurora Flash CMS , you will probably notice they have almost the same functionality but much better design and animation effects.

My favorite one is Triumph Flash CMS Template.

Another cool example is XML BG Portfolio

and one more nice template is A-Mega XML Flash Site

You will see all of these templates really soon online.

A couple of days ago Artin2ition purchased Aurora Commercial License allowing to create premium flash websites based on AuroraFlash API and Elements Libraries. Rich set of features provided by AuroraFlash Engine and powerful WYSIWYG interface give the developers all tools to create stunning flash websites and web templates with the most advanced Flash CMS application so far.
At the moment we have already created 6 premium layouts for AuroraFlash CMS, some of them will be shared online tomorrow.

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!