Deploying Frontal

From Frontal Wiki

By deploying Frontal, we're talking about creating the files that are needed to render your Frontal document on your web server, and thus, on your website.

A Frontal site is deployed just like any HTML web page that has Flash content, and we'll briefly describe that process here.

Let's say we have a domain named "mydomain.com" registered and hosted. Our first step would be to download a Frontal deployment package here.

Unzip the Frontal package. The download package contains a number of files:

• frontal_renderer.swf: A Frontal-enabled Flash movie to render your Frontal documents.
• index.htm: An HTML page that embeds the frontal_renderer.swf movie in a full-browser way. It need not be named index.htm -- you may rename it to whatever you like. This may be necessary if your web server expects HTML files to have the ".html" extension, or if you already have an index.htm file that you want to use. You may also make as many copies of it as you like -- allows you to serve up different Frontal documents at different addresses on your site.
• swfobject.js: This JavaScript file is the industry-standard SWF-embedding library http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/
• swfaddress.js: This JavaScript file is the industry-standard deep-linking library from Asual DZZD. http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/
• parameters.js: A simple JavaScript file to parse a web page's URL.
• frontal_document.xml: A sample Frontal document.

The next step is to copy and paste your Frontal document from your Workspace or wherever you have created it, and replae the file named frontal_document.xml that you downloaded.

The final step is to copy the files to your web server. This is typically done via FTP. In any case, your hosting service should've provided you with detailed instructions for how to copy files to your web server.

Assuming that you've copied the files to your domain's document root, you should now be able to see your Frontal document on http://mydomain.com/.

Adding a Second Frontal Document To Your Site

Adding a second Frontal document to your site can be done a few ways. First, let's look inside the index.htm file and find the following lines:

var flashvars = {
    siteDefnURL: paramValue ( 'frontalDocumentURL', 'frontal_document.xml' )
};

It's this code that determines the default Frontal definition that will be loaded. You may change "frontal_document.xml" to whatever you like. So one approach to having multiple documents is to make copies of index.htm and in each one change 'frontal_document.xml' to the name of the Frontal document that should be loaded.

Another approach is to use the "frontalDocumentURL" parameter. With this parameter, you can set the Frontal document to load via the web address. For example:

http://mydomain.com/index.htm

would load frontal_document.xml. But this:

http://mydomain.com/index.htm?frontalDocumentURL=frontal_document2.xml

would load frontal_document2.xml.

The Frontal Renderer SWF's Publish Settings

The Frontal Renderer SWF (frontal_renderer.swf) that comes with the deployment package is set to run at 30 frames per second. It is published for Flash Player 9. This is the same settings as are used for the Frontal renderer SWF that handles submissions from the workspace.

These settings may be changed by rebuilding the Frontal renderer as described here.