At first glance it seems as if they are asking for something that could take months to develop. However, it’s actually simple enough that could be done by patching one component from another. Done with one cup of coffee.

Flash supports HTML. But don’t get too excited. Flash only supports some basic tags. All you need then is to be able to push data to it. You could do this with several methods. One would be using LoadVars. Another one is the good old FlashVars and lastly through XML.

With this example we’re using LoadVars. Below are the only lines of codes you need to do a simple CMS.

// Simple just declare a text area contains an HTML markup
_root.content.html = true;
 
// Load the content
var contentVars = new LoadVars();
contentVars.onLoad = function(ok) {
  if (ok) {
    _root.content.htmlText = contentVars.flash_content;
  }
};
// load the file (use .php extension to avoid browsers from caching the content)
// no worries cause the content is encoded and no php script
// could be executed with this process
contentVars.load("flash_content.php");
 
// this is just to keep flash from running away
stop();

You might wonder why not just use Flash XML feature instead of LoadVars. Well that could be done also. It’s just what I felt doing at the time. Also since I was using php as my file extension XML might not be the right choice as it exposes some security holes.

Next step is the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor (WYSIWYG). There are lots available in the net. For this example I used TinyMCE. You would need to configure or do some hack to make the editor only use the tags supported by Flash. List of supported tags could be found in http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14808.

Once you get that done next step is to push the content of the editor to Flash. This is where PHP plays its role. Of course you could use other server side scripting in place of it.

The result would be something like this (Flash CMS sample). Go ahead and try it. You may also download the source files to modify and maybe improve it.

Solution:
The solution to this problem can be found at kb.adobe.com. You first need to uninstall the Flash Player that’s already in the system. You would find the uninstaller here. After that is done just download and install the older version archived here.

Note:
This appear to work with IE but not with Firefox. For Firefox users there is an even more convenient way. There is an add-on called Flash Switcher available at sephiroth.it.

ArgumentError: Error #2015: Invalid BitmapData.

This will work:
var ValidBitmapData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(2880, 2880);

This won’t:
var InvalidBitmapData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(3000, 3000);

According to www.adobe.com:
The maximum dimensions of a bitmap in Flash Player is limited to 2880 pixels in either direction (width or height). If you attempt to create a BitmapData instance that is larger than this restriction, the Bitmap will not be created. This limit is in place to keep people from creating Flash movies that gobble up the client’s RAM. A bitmap that is 2880 x 2880 pixels, will use roughly 32MB of RAM.

This restriction becomes more and more useless as computer hardware becomes more and more capable.

Solution:
The trick is to “kidnap” a BitmapData object from a loaded image with dimension over the limit of 2880 pixels (Which flash allows. Huh! Yes Flash can actually handle bitmaps larger the the limit. It just doesn’t let you create one.).

It’s simple. Create a dummy image with the dimension you need. Save it and make it accessible to Flash. Dynamically load it using ActionScript. And take the loader object’s BitmapData object. That’s why I termed it “kidnap”. We are actually just taking the child of the parent object(loader object), which is the BitmapData, and use it like we build it ourselves.

—
// 1. Create an image loader and
var DummyImageLoader:Loader = new Loader;

// 2. Assign a function to “kidnap” the BitmapData object
DummyImageLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, DummyImageOnComplete);

// 3. Load the image with the preferred dimension
var DummyImageRequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest(“dummy_image.jpg”);
DummyImageLoader.load(DummyImageRequest);

function DummyImageOnComplete(evt:Event):void
{
var DummyImageBitmap = Bitmap(DummyImageLoader.content);
// “kidnap” the BitmapData object
var ValidBitmapData:BitmapData = DummyImageBitmap.bitmapData;

// you can now use ValidBitmapData to draw any element larger than 2880×2880
}
—

This will then allow you to use ValidBitmapData as you would have when you used this line:

var InvalidBitmapData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(3000, 3000);

Only this time it works.

Files: bitmapdata_workaround.zip

Source:
Original Solution (I believe nobody have used this workaround before.)

Note:
If the required BitmapData dimension varies too often you could generate the image dynamically. In our site we used a PHP script utilizing GD library to create the dummy images. Calling the script like this: dummy_jpeg.php?w=3000&h=3000 where w is the width and h the hieght in pixels.