As many people know, I'm a big fan of Drupal, and I'm a huge fan of Flex, so when those two things come together, I'm super happy. Chris Charlton sent me a link to a new Flex Image Module for Drupal that uses a Flex interface to search for pictures on your hard drive, allows uploading via drag and drop, and incorporates a Google search for images.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to buy the module or get access to it to test it out. The download page asks me to login or register to download, but I can't login because I'm not registered, and I can't seem to register at all.

[From Flex Image Module | CMS Website Services | Drupal Website Design and Development Firm]

This blog and the Flex.org Showcase run on Drupal, a free and open source content management system (or PHP framework, depending on how you use it). The creator of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, has recently launched two startups related to Drupal. The first is Acquia, a company that hopes to commercialize Drupal, and the second is with Mollom, a hosted spam filtering service.
I've installed Mollom on this site to help protect against spam. The nice thing about Mollom is that it uses Flex's graphing capabilities to display statistics about spam caught by sites that are using it.

Jeff Whatcott, who was VP of product marketing here at Adobe, is Acquia's "Communicator in Chief". I think that means VP of marketing there too. Jeff thinks that Dries would make a great candidate for O'Reilly's Open Source Award. I couldn't agree with him more.

AirPress is a new application written in Flex and running in Adobe AIR that allows you to publish and edit blog posts locally. They've made support for Wordpress and dotClear available by default, but it will also work for Drupal based blogs if you enter yoururl.com/xmlrpc.com as the blog URL (and enable the blog API module).

There are some features in AirPress that I really like. For one, you can select images and videos directly from your computer, without having to upload them to the server first - a benefit of using AIR as the runtime. Secondly, you can record audio and video from your webcam and then put that into a blog post - a benefit of using Flex and Flash Player, which can access the local webcam and microphone. Videos are saved in .avi format, and then uploaded to the web. (I couldn't get this working on my Drupal installation.) Lastly, I like the format of the application - the fact that its not a square window sitting on my desktop makes it a more fun to use than a regular web browser.

Having said that, there are few things I don't like about the application. Spell checking is not supported, which is really annoying. It is supported in the browser on my Mac, it would be good to have it in the Flash Player as well (I think this is a limitation of the Flash Player and not the application.) The setup of the application was a bit hard - I'd prefer to enter in a URL and have it auto-discover all the settings that I need. Finally, I hate having to open up a text box to enter text - I'd prefer to put that into the application directly.

Other than that, this is a pretty cool AIR application, and is a good example of using the AIR platform for its strengths.

Here is a screenshot showing AirPress listing all the blog posts on this site.

Here is a screenshot of the new post window in AirPress.

Lullabot's latest Drupal podcast has a great interview with Scott Nelson, who launched the Services and AMFPHP modules for Drupal, allowing Flex developers to build front end interfaces to Drupal powered backend applications. If you're a PHP developer looking to get started with Flex, this is a great starting point. You can do quite a bit without having to write a lot of code (either front end or backend!). Listen to the podcast online, then check out the Services handbook page on drupal.org for samples on how to get started.

Justin Girard has written a great tutorial for the Services group at Drupal.org about integrating Flex and Drupal together using the AMFPHP and Services modules. A great read if you're interested in building out Flex front ends to Drupal based websites.

Many people think that deep linking and back button support in a Flash application are impossible. Scott Nelson who writes a number of modules for Drupal, a very popular and growing PHP framework for creating dynamic websites like this one, has created a cool website for a client that uses a combination of Flash, Drupal, JavaScript and search engine optimization. The site is for the XXX, and as you can see from this Google index (link removed), the entire site is indexed in Google. Clicking on any of the Google links results in the proper Flash page being loaded, after a quick trip to the main page of the site (by design).

Here's Scott's explanation on how he did this: "I built an html version of the site first to be used as the admin and the indexable content. You can see this by disabling javascript. Then, I use swfobject on the front page to replace the body tag with my swf. For all the other pages, I do a javascript redirect for anonymous users only to the homepage, including a hashed version of the url they landed on. Search engine spiders don't read javascript, so they view the entire site as HTML. When you click into a subpage from a search engine index, you are redirected to the Flash version of the page. Also, the swf includes back button functionality with history, and deep-linking capability. All major browsers seem to work except no back button in Safari."

Have you got any other tips on SEO optimization for Flash / Flex applications?