Advice on Gallery and Contact form

Hello,

Totally new to Flash but have taken the time to watch some tutorials on the Adobe site on how to build a website using Flash CS5 (Paul Trani 10 part guide), as well as other videos.

I have a website SWF that works ok when running the file on my desktop, and all the navigation etc works as wanted. However all the tutorials I have watched none have really covered gallery implementation or setting up a contact form. I have found some resources regarding the contact form and will be trying to implement them but any suggestions on this would be useful.

As far as the gallery is concerned I wanted to implement something like Lightbox, with images dynamically load images so they can be changed easily. Played around with UILoader with limited success, but additionally how easy would be just to insert a JQuery gallery into the flash?

I have no Action script programming knowledge, have played around with HTML and CSS though.

Not after a definitive answer just guidance really as not sure how to proceed or which is best.

Cheers in advance

Ant

Funnily enough I'm working on a Flash portfolio myself. For my gallery, I created mine all in ActionScript 3.0. I don't think you would want to try and embed jQuery code inside of Flash to create a portfolio as it seems a very unnatural thing to do just to make a Flash gallery, and to me sounds like something that would take longer than just building the gallery in Flash.

For a gallery, the simplest concept is having an XML data file with all your gallery items in it. This tutorial shows a decent example of this idea in action: http://www.republicofcode.com/tutori...s3gridgallery/

Because XML is just data, the possibilities of what you do with that data are virtually endless.

As for a contact form, again, Republic of Code has a tutorial on it: http://www.republicofcode.com/tutori...s3contactform/

I must sound like a poster boy for that site, but hey, it has a few nice and simple tutorials for some basic things in Flash.

Danny,

Thanks very much for the information those links will come in very handy, the gallery is pretty much what I was after. I will get this running first then explore the possibility of placing arrow buttons on each image to move to the next.

Funny enough I had the link for this contact form already but didn't see the image gallery turtorial.

Cheers,

Ant

Okay then, good luck with everything and hope it all works out! I've done a few XML galleries myself (not wild crazy or anything, but just to-the-point galleries with transitions), so if you get stuck, I might be able to answer a few more questions.