Possible to do pure flash front end?

Hello zencarters,

First off let me say that I've used zencart for another project (http://kalafineart.com) for some time, and love it. I have a new customer who is creating a highly branded product, and in order to maximize the full user experience, they want the store to have the rich feeling of flash, and only flash.

My personal preference is to go with Zen over osCommerce, but I can't find any definitive or even just informative topics on this issue in your forums. Am I just being dense? Is there a tutorial / howto / doc about how to do this?

I'm not kidding myself about the amount of work involved here - it does seem fairly substantial. It seems that osCommerce has some discussion of it in their boards, and if that's all the discussion to be had, I guess I had best go with them, despite my own personal preference.

Any suggestions / tips / guidance is much appreciated!

--ben

Although new to Zen, I am not new to HTML, CSS, Flash etc.

IMHO, disuade him...

When the "Internet" brings out new and wacky stuff, EVERYONE wants it...

People on "That Auction Site" STILL puts Wizards and Music because they don't think anyone else has done so...

All the PC's at my office do NOT have flash. My employees do not need it for day to day work. If they want to use it for personal stuff they can do so... But they can do so without installing Flash.. AND a lot of other "So called" enhancements.

Have you got any existing sites (or even "Auction Sites") that have any kind of stats? Check them out and see how many people do and do not have flash... Do you really want to alienate people...

If he wants you to do a flash site AND maintain a non flash site, then you could be onto a big earner...

JMHO.

Take a look at your generated source, you know, the "Page Source" menu item under View in FF or the "Source" menu item in IE.

You'll find all the links you need there for the front end. Just add them to your flash buttons.

Now I think the new flash will use php functions, but I'm not convinced of it yet, since I haven't actually upgraded from MX.

In MX, you can bring html into flash, so what I think you could do is create a blank page, us the includes command to bring in the featured products, and run a flash box that will bring in the html for the featured or new products.

Goolge, php and flash mx, or even better, the latest flash.

JP

Thanks Jon,

The customer is a very design focused guy, who has a heavy flash background. He's aware of the drawbacks of using flash, but due to the kind of product he's dealing with, he feels it's a necessary decision.

Sorry for not replying earlier, I thought I would get an email subscription to the thread, but that seems to have not worked how I thought it would

thanks again!

jon27240:

Although new to Zen, I am not new to HTML, CSS, Flash etc.

IMHO, disuade him...

When the "Internet" brings out new and wacky stuff, EVERYONE wants it...

People on "That Auction Site" STILL puts Wizards and Music because they don't think anyone else has done so...

All the PC's at my office do NOT have flash. My employees do not need it for day to day work. If they want to use it for personal stuff they can do so... But they can do so without installing Flash.. AND a lot of other "So called" enhancements.

Have you got any existing sites (or even "Auction Sites") that have any kind of stats? Check them out and see how many people do and do not have flash... Do you really want to alienate people...

If he wants you to do a flash site AND maintain a non flash site, then you could be onto a big earner...

JMHO.

birdoasis,

thanks for the suggestions, I'll look into what you suggest.

cheers!

By the way,

Flash isn't slow if you use actionscript to create it. I have a book somewhere around here that talks about designing with actionscript. Using the nice clean code from the book you should be able to make it pop right up.

Test an existing zen cart site at this link. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
(Kim gets full credit for telling me about the site speed analyzer).

then test it with your flash mod to see if it's faster or slower.