Recently in Flash Category

On a recent project, I needed to produce a simple slide show, like this one, so I used SlideShow Pro (SSP) to create it. The difference was that I needed to have captions appear below the slide show and a click through button on top of it to let the viewer know that there was a profile attached to the image. Since SSP doesn’t do this “out of the box” I had to resort to using some ActionScript.

Note: All code here is AS2 and I assume you already know how to use SSP.

Create your slide show

I already figured out how to make my captions display externally, so review that post for more detailed info. For this project, here’s a quick overview:

• Create your Flash document using ActionScript 2 (code here is in AS2).
• Place your SSP instance and give it an instance name of my_ssp.
• Publish your slide show and make sure it’s working.

When creating slide shows for Mizzou Wire, I wanted them to look similar to the normal photos with each story: an inset image with a caption underneath (an example). Out-of-the-box, Slideshow Pro presents photo captions as an overlay when you mouse over the image. In order to have captions formatted the way I wanted, below the image and slide navigation, I had to do some customization. It required a bit of ActionScript coding, but with the help of the SSP Customization Guide and the user forums, I was able to figure it out.

Turn off captions in the component

First, create a slide show like you normally would in Flash. In the Component Inspector set Caption Appearance to Hidden.

Give the component an instance name

Next select the SSP component and give it the instance name 'my_ssp'.

With the development of Mizzou Wire, Mizzou’s news and features Web site, we knew we were going to want to have multimedia with our stories — including slide shows, audio, video and other kinds of media we haven’t thought of yet. The challenge was finding a way to present all this information in a uniform way so the end user could easily view it, but also make it manageable for us to update using our content management system.

It took a bit of research and trial and error, but I think we’ve found a system that covers all the bases and doesn’t require a lot of money or programming time.