As a response of how to create a Flash Carousel in a Freeway Web page, here’s a tutorial:

View code
Title: Flash Carousel
Description: Flash Carousel displaying on a Freeway Page

What you need is:

  1. Freeway 4/5
  2. Upload Stuff action installed
  3. Carousel Files - download from here:
  4. We’re using the files from the “color” folder.
  5. Plain Text Editor
  6. FTP program (to upload the Carousel ”images” folder)
  7. Technical ability, moderate (requires a little hand coding)

Create the Page from Scratch:

Create a new Freeway page

Drag and drop the “Carousel.swf” from the “color” folder onto the Freeway page re-size as required. In Freeway make the .swf background white.

Flash file in page

Flash file in page

Open the file upload action Menu > Page > Page Action > Upload Stuff

From the “upload to HTML location” add the file “default.xml” and “swfobject.js” from the “color” folder.

File Upload action

File Upload action

Go to Page > HTML Markup and Add into the after <head> section and add…
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”swfobject.js”></script>

Add Markup after text

Add Markup after text

Publish the page, and you will see the Carousel working, but it can’t find the images.

Look in the “color” folder and (option-drag) to copy the “images” folder into your Freeway published site fodler site folder (complete with stock images inside it).

Publish the page again, and you will see the images correctly spinning.

Changing the Stock images supplied with the Flash Carousel

Now you should have got the basic Flash Carousel working in Freeway, you now need to add your own images. For this you need to do two things:

Have a collection of JPEG images (for example JPEG’s, graphics created and exported from Photoshop or Freeway). These images are placed into the “images folder” - (either replace or remove the existing JPEG’s).

Edit the default.xml file to include your image names and correct link to those files.

Editing the default.xml file:

The XML file contains the information the flash files needs to find the images, and hyper-links you give them: 

  1. Background color
  2. Image files names
  3. Image URL’s

 
You should find this quite simple, open the “default.xml” file with a plain  text editor and change the DCP_0733.jpg for the name of your new JPEG e.g. myphoto.jpg this will then link to your image in the “images folder”.

Editing the links in the Flash Carousel:

To create the links within the flash file to link to your destination pages, edit the hyperlink “http://www.flshow.net” to you own hyperlink “http:www.mydomain/mypage.html”

---------------------------------------------------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!--
fhShow Carousel 1.5 configuration file


Please visit http://www.flshow.net/ for more info
-->
<slide_show>
<options>
<background>#FFFFFF</background>		<!-- #RRGGBB, transparent -->
</options>
<photo href="http://www.flshow.net/" target="_self">./images/DCP_0730.jpg</photo>
<photo href="http://www.flshow.net/" target="_self">./images/DCP_0731.jpg</photo>
<photo href="http://www.flshow.net/" target="_self">./images/DCP_0732.jpg</photo>
<photo href="http://www.flshow.net/" target="_self">./images/DCP_0733.jpg</photo>
</slide_show>
---------------------------------------------------------

Note the <background>#FFFFFF</background> contains the HEX colours required for the background on the .swf file in Freeway so you can view the transparency correctly.

These are the basics to get your Flash Carousel Working on a white background, and you should refer to the readme.txt supplied with the Carousel download for further configuration or here for the online documentation.

Download the Freeway Example file here.

Using a Flash Carousel with Lightbox.