In the spirit of trying to cram far more into the first quarter of the year that is probably healthy I’ve been learning AS3. Just completed (well make ready for initial release) my first AS3 application. It’s a file browser/selector for the php content management system I’ve been writing since January. The CMS has been pretty successful so far, clients have been very positive about it’s ease of use and the flexibility of the code means I’ve already re-purposed large chunks of it for other projects (mostly small budget web-template systems). There’s still a lot of functionality I’d like to add to it if time allows and I’d love to make it open source and more extensible but right now I don’t have the time.

The only horrible flaw with it was the file management system, although you could upload files, group them, add meta data and assorted other stuff, the act of including one in a content page (as an inline image, link or whatever) was a pain in the arse. It was mostly done through a plugin in TinyMCE which wangs up a popup with a list of all the files uploaded to the file library as clickable links. This is fine if you have 5 files and you know the filename of the file you are looking for but it becomes ungainly and irritating if you have any greater number of files. So for my first AS3 app I put together a nice file browser which gives you thumbnails all nicely paginated with a set of filters (alphanumeric, by file group and by file extension).

It has a couple of bugs which will need to be ironed out and I’d like to completely update the layout and some of the functionality to make it a bit of a smoother process. There’s a couple of flaws with the usability which I want to address BUT overall I’m pretty happy with it for a first version and a first AS3 project. I’ve integrated it with a couple of our client’s CMS systems and I’ll see what the feedback is like.

Click here to play with the online demo