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Posts Tagged ‘swf’

MooTools and Swiff: Slideshow / Thumbnail Gallery

Saturday, May 17th, 2008

I have recently launched a website for the Bramham Lodge Residential Development in Bramham Village.

The site features a neat Slideshow / Thumbnail Gallery implementation using MooTools and Flash (utilising the Swiff utility of MooTools 1.2).

A demo can be seen on the Bramham Lodge Apartment page.

The SlideShow makes use of Flash to create easily customisable image transition effects that are not possible with JavaScript alone. A collection of MooTools classes are employed to mange the Swiff interface and control the slideshow.

Key Features

  • Images are not hard-coded into flash: no need to recompile the SWF when adding/removing or re-ordering the gallery as all data is presented in the XHTML markup.
  • Extensible and customisable: The slideshow class makes use of MooTools Events so that add-on classes can be created for bolt-on features whilst being kept separate from the core functionality.
  • Accessible: No content is hard-coded into flash, search engines are able to index all the information.

The modular nature of the code and the ability to change the implementation using bolt-on functionality has allowed me to re-use the same set of classes on an upcoming project in a completely different fashion, making use of the great features of Flash without sacrificing indexable content and accessibility.