swftools 6.x-3.0-beta4

This could be the best release of SWF Tools yet.

The key feature in here is the all new integration with Views. You want a playlist? It's here! Collect your files from CCK and send them directly in to SWF Tools without any other module.

You generate a playlist directly out of Views, and send it to the profile of your choice. So now you can create playlists in pages or blocks that do things like "the ten most recent files uploaded" or "all the files from user xx" in just a few clicks. If your CCK content type has thumbnail images then they can be mapped over to your playlist (looks great with the JW Player flow plug-in!)

SimpleViewer has been upgraded so it now uses the newer SimpleViewer 2 (I'm afraid the settings don't migrate yet so reset your configuration page).

TiltViewer is now supported, and it plays beautifully with Views - you can pull your node content through to be displayed on the reverse of the TiltViewer images by mapping the data directly from the Views configuration.

There's a whole host of other tweaks and fixes.

I think things are mostly stable so I've taken the plunge and released BETA-4 because I would love some feedback on the Views stuff having never written a views plug in before.

Sorry 6.x-3.x is taking a while to come out, but please bear with me - I think it's going to be good!

Other new features include swftools now exposing itself as a form element, so you can add Flash directly to a form by creating an element of type #swftools. Send it a file (or array of files) on #value and SWF Tools will render it.

There is also a new light weight API module. This does nothing more than let you access the embedding methods, so if you want to embed Flash on your website you don't have to write your own embedding but you can call SWF Tools. The API does none of the clever stuff like rendering players - it just puts flash on the page for you. Not sure if it will be adopted but it's there.

NB - you need to run update.php for this release as there are more changes to the underlying database.