Ever since I discovered Tim Wilson’s implementation of a flash-based theme for Wordpress a few days ago, I’ve been a man obsessed, I must discover not only how it was done, but how to do the same thing with my own sites. Although I obtained a copy of his website’s template, the code made little sense to me and I saw little use in only being able to use pages to display my posts. I instead sought out alternatives, and found a promising one in AMFPHP, a framework which allows one to make PHP calls from inside Flash. However, what the developers of AMFPHP fail to mention is that you need FlexBuilder to access the libraries needed to read the data AMFPHP returns to your Flash document. Bastards. That being that, after about 6 hours of trying without Flex, I surrendered and set about the task of finding myself a copy. My quest for a Flash-based Wordpress theme is, I fear, only beginning.
Y’all might’ve noticed the nifty bit of Flash at the top of this site that displays images linked to featured posts. That’s a plug-in for Wordpress developed by a guy named Rich Christiansen, who I recently had the pleasure of corresponding with when I had trouble installing his work. Even though Rich gives away this awesome plugin for free to any blogger willing to try it, Rich was more than happy to devote quite a bit of time to helping me out with all my problems. Rich is a real talent, and gracious to boot; he even listed me as a debugger on Featurific’s download page. Anyone who’s got a Wordpress blog really ought to try it out, it gives a real flair to the site. The free version offers quite a few themes and configuration options, and is pretty easy to put to your own needs through the wp-admin back-end. Anyone who wishes to get even more opotions, such as removing the “Featurific” logo from the bottom of the plugin which links to Rich’s site, oughtta pony up the dough for Featurific Pro, and support Rich for all the work he’s done. Thanks again Rich!
To download Featurific, please visit Rich’s Featurific download page.