Hour 20. Designing a Website to Be Modular

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• How to use the MovieClipLoader to play one movie inside another or display an external image (.jpg, .gif, or .png)

• How the loadSound action lets you play external MP3 sounds

• The benefits of and how to use shared libraries

It's possible to create a huge website entirely with one giant Flash file. However, separating the site into modular segments has distinct advantages. Just to name a few, you can have portions of the site load as needed (instead of making every visitor download everything), several team members can work on the same site simultaneously, you can update portions of the site as they change instead of having to reedit one master file, and you can create different versions of the site for different languages by just swapping out portions with language-specific content. There are other reasons modularity is good, but it comes down to efficiency, your productivity, and the user experience.

This hour covers several ways a Flash site can be modularized as well as some of the issues you'll need to consider in deciding when and where tomodularize.

Although the technical concepts covered this hour are not particularly difficult, the Flash features discussed are strict and unforgiving. As long as you use the correct syntax, you'll be fine. Ultimately, the difficulty comes in deciding the appropriate use of such features. That is, it's easy to learn how these features work, but it's more difficult to decide when to use them and where to use them. For each feature, you'll first learn how it works and then look at practical uses.