English Yacs handbook Content management

How to use Flash to animate the home page?

Did you know that PHP is able to generate Flash objects, through the Ming extension? To develop YACS we have reused sample code provided with some Ming tutorial, and have linked this to the table of articles in the database.

The result is a nice animation that outlines most recent published articles.

And each time a new article will be added to your site, YACS will proudly flag its title at the home page. Isn't it a cool feature?

[title]How to activate Flash?[/title]

YACS does not trigger the Flash animation, because some servers poorly support Ming. For example, many Windows-based hosts cannot handle Ming fonts at all.

Therefore, you have to test this feature before activating it.

Go to the Control Panel, and from here, to the configuration panel for skins.

Locate the checkbox related to Flash. Click on the suggested link to test this in a separate window. If flashy titles appear, you can close the window and check the checkbox safely. But if you got only an empty page, please do not activate the Flash option.

[title]How to configure Flash?[/title]

Visit the home page after the activation of the Flash option. Everything is running fine? Ok, now you may attempt to adapt the Flash rendering to the design of your site.

Go to the Control Panel again, and then to the configuration panel for Flash.

From here you can change several visual parameters:

[*] background colors - indicate separately values for red, blue, and for green colors; if no value is set, YACS will generate a transparent background.

[*] foreground colors - indicate separately values for red, blue, and for green colors; if no value is set, YACS will apply the Slashdot green color.

[*] font file - the file name, including the ’.fdb’ extension; by default, YACS uses ’Bimini.fdb’.

[*] font size