Together with our friend, Mihai Corlan (Adobe Evangelist) we released FxGallery, a Drupal Image Module. Mihai came with the challenge to build an image gallery module for Drupal and we liked it and got involved into the FxGallery project.

FxGallery has 3 main view: Gallery View, Cover Flow View and Single View. The image module can manage 3 kinds of image galleries: Flickr, Picasa and Local Gallery that is saved directly in the Drupal. In Single View there is also the possibility to add comments for the local gallery.

The project is kind of complex but not complex enough to use some Flex frameworks like Cairngorm. In the project we used the following libraries:

• XMLRPCFlash – for communication between the Flex client and the Drupal back end
• ActionScript 3 Flickr Library – for connecting to Flickr
• Picasa ActionScript 3 Library – for connecting to Picasa
• GreenSock Tweening Library – for some animations
• as3corelib – a utility library for ActionScript 3
• DisplayShelf Flex component – for the cover flow view

It was great to work with Mihai and Magda on this project and we hope that we will be able to develop it even further. The things we could do next are:

• Port it to Flex 4
• Add comment feature to Flickr and Picasa type of albums
• Implement deep linking
• Integration with Photoshop.com and other social web applications
• Mouse gestures using Flash Player 10.1

You can view a webinar held by Mihai and you can download the module and the sources from Mihai’s blog. Also a working example can be seen here: http://fxgallery.corlan.org.

I know you’ll want to know more so follow the following links:
http://myadobe.ro/2010/03/11/building-an-image-module-for-drupal/
http://corlan.org/creating-drupal-modules-with-flex/fx-gallery-drupal-module/
http://corlan.org/creating-drupal-modules-with-flex/
http://fxgallery.corlan.org

Our friend Mihai Corlan, who is an Platform Evangelist for Adobe, has a nice idea and ask us to give him a hand to build a Drupal image module with Flex. Now it’s ready and Mihai will talk about this on Feb 05, 2010.

From his web seminar agenda:

• Front end design of widgets and main page
• Back-end integration with Drupal
• Importing your libraries from Flickr and Picassa
• How to account for loading issues when having large libraries of images
• Why Flex and ActionScript where the technology of choice for such a project

Please reed more about it and register at: http://drupalimagemodule.eventbrite.com.