The music group “Righteous Tribe” hails from Uganda, Africa, where the members each individually worked for various aid-focussed NGO’s. They have each travelled the world raising funds to support organizations like AOET (www.aoet.org) and to come alongside the world’s most vulnerable people. Now, they have formed the US-based group “Righteous Tribe” to take their group to the next level and attempt to catch the eye of a record company. Although they are striking out commercially to provide a better life for their families, their commitment to the underprivileged has not waned. They still perform fundraising events and have committed themselves to raising funds for those less fortunate, regardless of how “big” they get. In the purest sense, this is not a “charity” project, as the group is not a charity, but our volunteers were willing to come alongside them and develop a site worthy of an up-and-coming music group.

The founder of “the Tribe” picked a nice-looking Flash website from a template company. This provided the foundation for the site, but updating the site required heavy knowledge of very expensive software (Adobe Flash CS3, specifically) and this did not fit our goal of putting our clients in complete control of our “creations”. So the goal of this project was to create an interface that would allow “the Tribe” to update their website through a web browser. Our volunteer (Peter) came up with the idea of the “FlashCMS” which would allow this update capability as long as the Flash template was modified to read data (blog entries, news, photos, videos, music, etc) from a PHP script fed by a MySQL database. This project required not only working knowledge of Flash, but also PHP, MySQL and JavaScript coding experience. Peter took on the entire project, leading to the creation of what we call “FlashCMS v1.0″. It is our hope that “FlashCMS” can be used to provide a Flash-based website for other clients as well.

With “v1.0″ completed, our focus turns to securing and beta-testing the application. In addition to the FlashCMS, most clients seeking a Flash site need an HTML-based “mirror” of their site to accommodate not only web crawlers (which need to understand the site’s content) but also visitors using older browsers or slow Internet connections. This need for an HTML site spawned another project which seeks to create a look-alike HTML site that pulls data from the same MySQL-fed PHP script. In layman’s terms this means that clients will get a sweet-looking Flash site and a more practical, matching HTML site, each of which are updated simultaneously through a web-based administrative console.