March 24, 2007 

WordPress in Flex/AS3

As some of you, who wandered over to Gabo’s blog recently may know, Gabo is trying to create a flash UI for WordPress. I gave me a peek earlier this week and all I can say is its gonna be awesome. Of course his one requirement was getting the data out of WP in XML so he wrote some custom PHP code for that. However there is an XML-RPC interface to WordPress and I decided to see if I could quickly whip up something using it.
Turns out I didn’t even have to write an XML-RPC library, since there already is one written by Akeem Philbert. So I just wrote a custom WordPress class extending his class and ta-daaa. This is just the first stab at the implementation and its not feature complete yet (ie, not the complete API has been implemented). But if someone wants to use it, go ahead and try it out.

Note: The XML-RPC library always authenticates against WordPress to get data. Data is also sent over HTTP-POST so is exposed if someone uses a browser traffic sniffer. So I recommend creating a new user on WordPress with only ‘subscriber’ privileges and using that if you are creating a public application that doesnt need authentication.

Note 2: The XML-RPC implementation can be used to post, edit and delete entries as well, so if someone wants to make a blog manager application, you can use this as well.

View the Flex WordPress app here and right click to view source.

To compile the application, you will need to download the as3-rpclib library from here

  • akeem

    Glad the library helped. Ironically it was born out of the same idea mentioned here (i tried amfphp then decided to do xmlrpc). Even more ironic is that i am in fact working on a blog manager in apollo that uses the movabletype api. It uses cairngorm though but if you are interested I can share with you once i get to alpha (with a 9 month old son my alpha takes as long as usual beta to make :) )

  • http://www.flex-fanatic.com Chris Seahorn

    Pretty cool!!

    I think there are a few of us working blogs of various types. I know Peter Ent is working on a groung up blog and your example is the first I’ve seen that taps into an existing blog framework.

    I’ve got an ongoing Flex Blog build that uses MySQL / PHP with commenting and such and is slowing evolving into something worthy of submission somewhere. Here is one of it’s permalinks..

    http://www.flex-fanatic.com/index2.php?cid=3&did=189

  • http://www.arpitonline.com arpit

    Akeem, I would love to get the alpha once you have it up. I love your implementation so far and was very easy to work with. Chris, I liked your blog and I know there are a couple of complete flash/flex implementations but there are a lot of things WordPress seems to give out of the box that I wouldnt want to reimplement. But I do want to use the power of flash to add cool features to a blog. Ideally I want to manage the blog using the basic stuff but have a rockin’ UI for it.

  • http://www.flex-fanatic.com Chris Seahorn

    I hope I didn’t give the wrong impression. I really think you’re approach is much smarter and WordPress is just a perfect choice IMO.

    A few people who seem to bash anything Flex based have been ribbing me lately about it with things like “do people even blog anymore?” and “blogs are so yesterday” so I’m glad to see other Flex users into Flex delivered blog systems and also to know I’m not the only one who thinks blogging is still very much today :)

  • http://www.arpitonline.com arpit

    Lol… IMHO anyone who thinks blogging is dying has his head buried in sand somewhere. Personal publishing on the web is rampant, even challenging traditional media. I get more news from blogs and MXNA than any site, and so do almost all of my friends :) . Blogging rocks !!! My thing now is, well, all blogs look the same and Flash/Flex are great for breaking traditional metaphors on user interface (in a good way most of the time ;) ).I have some cool ideas I’ll try to implement once I get some time.

    Cheers

  • http://www.judahfrangipane.com judah

    cool! i have been working towards the same thing. i made a wordpress flash/flex header that you can see at my site. i also have been working on a html component so you can display your html from wordpress. i have been preparing the html component for beta and should be available anyday now. my end goal is to get a full blog design with flex but pulling the data from wordpress. check my site over the next few days. :)
    html component preview
    http://www.judahfrangipane.com/blog/?p=79

  • http://www.paradox1x.org Karl

    One feature request I’d like to ask for right away is post permalinks. Without permalinks – you don’t have a blog :)

    Otherwise – awesome work man!

  • http://thanksmister.com Mister

    There is a really nice Flex-based blog used for Incito. The great thing about it, it does not look like a Flex application.

    http://www.blog.incito.lt/#/Post/Flash_blog_beta/

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  • http://www.concepthue.com/blog Tom

    The race is on to build a lot of things…I think Flex has opened up the flood gates…but I’m starting to think it’s not so much a “race” as it is a revolution. I am not a fan of flash – well, wasn’t. However Flex is changing that. I came here because I was trying to see if anyone made a Flex/AS3 front end to WP…I think I may go for it…lol if I had time. Only instead of using XML…I was thinking about something a little faster =) AMFPHP I think would be great for this due to its speed. Maybe it can be integrated real nice? I don’t know…but I do know I like AMFPHP + Flex…it’s the future.

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  • http://www.panremmus.co.uk Damien Jorgensen – Cardiff

    Flex does appear to be opening up a lot!
    Mind Silverlight is coming too

  • http://www.cheap-hosting-solutions.net Hosting Reviews

    Sounds Great. While FLASH is never the best answer in SEO it has its uses.

  • http://www.judahfrangipane.com judah

    Dang, this comment is getting errors. Original message:

    Thanks for the example! I’m trying to get it to work on my site and I think I did it right but I get an error:

    TypeError: Error #1086: The name method only works on lists containing one item.

    Have you run into this?

  • http://www.judahfrangipane.com judah

    The error went away when I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress (at the time of this writing it is version 2.2).

  • http://tvtips.org/ TV

    The race is on to build a lot of things…I think Flex has opened up the flood gates…but I’m starting to think it’s not so much a “race” as it is a revolution.

  • http://www.alexonrails.net alex

    Nice, dude, but let me ask you something, what about of meta tags or tags for the search engine of google?..

  • http://www.arpitonline.com arpit

    @alex,
    If you want a Flash/Flex based blog and want it indexable by google, you would use the shadow site approach (make a completely functional html site and the replace it with the Flash version via javascript). That way googlebots see the html site and everything works out.

  • http://flexbandit.com Matt Clark

    I too am starting to go down this route. The shadow site approach is very time efficient, as the whole of WordPress already exists for you to use as an HTML version of your Flex site. I have started writing a series of blogs on the subject, the first part of which can be found at:

    http://flexbandit.com/archives/7

    Roll on Flash Player 10, when SWF trawling by search engines should become a reality!

  • John

    Has anyone managed to use metaWeblog.newPost. I can’t figure out how to post a blog entry.Pl. help
    Thanks

  • http://www.arpitonline.com arpit

    @John,
    I havent tried using metaWeblog.newPost. Sorry.

  • http://www.progs.fr Dean

    John,
    You have to edit a file to use metaWeblog.newPost
    (XMLRPCSerializer.as)

    http://www.progs.fr/flex-wordpress-xmlrpc-metaweblognewpost

  • http://blog.absentdesign.com Reuben

    I have just developed an AS3 wrapper for the WordPress XML-RPC API using Akeem’s library if anyone is interested in making flash front-ends for WordPress (and doesn’t have the time to build their own!)
    http://blog.absentdesign.com/?page_id=22

  • http://blog.absentdesign.com Reuben

    I’ve actually just finished developing an open source AS3 library that can be used for connecting WordPress XML-RPC with flash, and includes most of the wp, metaweblog and mt extensions.

    You can get documentation and source from here:
    http://blog.absentdesign.com/?page_id=22

    Cheers,

    Reuben

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  • dl

    why not write a blog from scratch rather than using a php blog as backend? It would be much sexier to have inplace editing in flex etc. or easy page building like iWeb , powerpoint etc …

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  • http://www.oyunsyar.org kraloyun

    an application must be added to wordpress archive. Thanks for the description and sharing.

  • http://www.sohbetland.net sohbet

    I’ve actually just finished developing an open source AS3 library that can be used for connecting WordPress XML-RPC with flash, and includes most of the wp, metaweblog and mt extensions.