Cool TV-remote style navigation using Flash MX and Php

topics: flash MX, Php, widget , free flash source, download

About two months ago I were working at an adult website, whose extension was .TV (you'll know which site is at the end of this article). I thought it would be nice to have a kind of navigation that could remind a common remote controller, just like the one we all use for our own tv set.

So i started to design it in Flash...below there's how it looks

cool uh? :-)

The principle behind is to have the same menu regardless of the number of the pages of the site. If each page has a number as a name, the same menu can reach it whether the site has 2 pages or 6893 pages.

With a little actionscript knowledgement, each digit adds his value to the black display (which is a dynamic text field), so if "7" and "9" are digited, the number 79 appears on black display.

Ok, but how to make browser go to "79.html"?

Php came to help.

I turned black text field in a variable container, and passed it to a php page (channel.php) that worked as a redirectory, in this way:

<?php
$location = "http://www.yourdomain.com/" . $Display . ".html";
header("Location: $location");
?>

Easy to explain, channel.php take the variable "Display" and includes in a url adding the domain name and .html as extension, so if 79 is digited, channel.php turn the variable 79 into http://www.yourdomain.com/79.html

That was good...

BUT

What if the page does not exist?

That was a problem, because channel.php creates a varlable-based url, without checking if the page exists or not.

Htaccess was my second helper and its "error handling" feature was what I used to solve it all.

Since channel.php tries to reach a page named "Display.html" whether the page exist or not, if the page is not, a 404 error is generated.
So i made a .htaccess file like this

ErrorDocument 401 http://www.yourdomain.com/nochannel.html
ErrorDocument 403 http://www.yourdomain.com/nochannel.html
ErrorDocument 404 http://www.yourdomain.com/nochannel.html
ErrorDocument 500 http://www.yourdomain.com/nochannel.html

therefore each time channel.php tries to reach a page that doesn't exist, htaccess redirects user to a specified page.

Graphically, it can be explained in image below

DO YOU WANT TO SEE THIS MENU IN PURE ACTION?
As i said before, I used this widget in an adult site I was working at. Now the site is dead (it was never born...). You can see cool-remote-navigation in action , you can use this menu, you can grab the graphic templates (i think they're not awful), whatever...We invented this menu (and we are saying that you CAN use it), so dont' mind about copyrights

http://www.cybercore.tv/adult.html
(working links are 10 ... 12 ... and few others...)

DOWNLOAD SOURCE (.zip format)

You can use, edit, enhance this menu the way you like. You can use it in a personal or business site, we don't care. All we ask is a link to http://www.googlerank.com somewhere on your site.