Flash frontend for drupal site using RSS.

so no one has any tips for flash front ends to drupal backend?

I haven't tried steves suggestion with the amfphp module - which I will do when I get a chance... but in the meantime I've had a few questions on what exactly I'm doing in my method, so I'll briefly describe the drupal side of things - which is very straightforward!

I'm using the CCK module with CCK Image field, the Contemplate module, and the views module. I am not using any other modules (not the image module, image gallery or anything).

1. I created a new CCK type (portfolio_item) which has a title and body (standard CCK fields) and then TWO image fields. One for the thumbnail, one for main image. The reason I did it this way is because I want the thumbnail to be a different picture than the main image - so I didnt use any automatic thumbnail generating modules (image module, imagecache etc.)

2. I created a very simple taxonomy structure and assigned to portfolio_items - actually its hardly a structure, just a simple list! taxonomy vocabulary: 'Portfolio' - terms: 'narrative, promotional, sketches, misc'.

3. Using Views module I created a 'portfolio' view (http://janelaurie.com/cms/portfolio) which has an exposed filter for the portfolio term (so you can see when viewing in html) and also RSS: RSS FEED Selector added as an argument to the view (with value set to 'Display All Values'). You can see the effect of this filter by adding an argument to the url, e.g. http://janelaurie.com/cms/portfolio?filter0=2.

4. You can view the RSS feed by adding 'feed' to the url http://janelaurie.com/cms/portfolio/feed?filter0=2

5. The fields displayed for each node in the RSS is not related to the fields displayed in the view. In my Views I had it setup as a table, showing only the thumbnail, title and taxonomy. For the RSS we need different data, thats where the contemplate module comes in. With that you write a little phpcode to tell drupal what to display for teaser, body and RSS (more info on the contemplate page). So my RSS code is simply:

<?php print $node->field_main_image[0]['filepath']."|" ?>
<?php print $node->field_thumbnail[0]['filepath']."|" ?>
<?php print $node->content['body']['#value'] ?>

The title is automatically added, so I just dump the urls to the images and the body. When parsing the XML in flash all this data appears in one tag so I use the '|' character to seperate the info. (If anyone knows a better way to do this would be appreciated).

6. In flash I call xmlJPGs.load("http://www.janelaurie.com/cms/portfolio/feed?filter0=" + iCategory) and parse the XML. I'm not gonna go into details on that cos its just standard flash xml parsing... loads of tutorials on the web for that.

So thats it basically, if anyone has any suggestions they are more than welcome...