Building a simple website using ActionScript 3.0
This is a tutorial on how to make a four “page” website.
1. Open a new Flash file (AS 3.0).
2. First we’ll make our four buttons. Draw a rectangle on the stage. I set my x and y coordinates to be at 25.
figure 1
3. Turn the shape into a movie clip. Double click to select the shape, press F8 (or right click and Convert to Symbol), name it “navbg_mc”, and hit OK.
figure 2
4. Now we’ll create three more instances of this movie clip object. To align them we can select all, hit Command (⌘) + K to open our Align panel (or Window > Align), then click “Align left edge” (figure 4: circled in red). You may need to reposition the x coordinate of the rectangles on the stage to 25. Next, click “Distribute vertical center” (figure 4: circled in blue). This will distribute all of the items evenly between the first (top) and last (bottom) item.
figure 3
figure 4
5. Title the layer “nav bkgnd” for navigation background.
6. Add a new layer and title it “nav txt” for the navigation text and lock the nav bkgnd layer.
figure 5
7. Now add text for each of the navigational buttons. Be sure your text boxes are on whole pixels. This will be important when we publish our movie. The text may appear blurry if it sits on a partial pixel (i.e. if x was equal to 25.5).
figure 6
8. Unlock the nav bkgnd layer. We are now going to turn these into individual movie clips, but first, give each rectangle (instance of navbg_mc) an instance name of “navbg”.
figure 7
9. Now that we have done that we can select each rectangle and the text corresponding and create our movie clips. Select the home text and the rectangle underneath. Convert it into a Movie Clip Symbol (F8 or right click, Convert to Symbol). Name it nav_home_mc. Repeat this for each item, naming them appropriately (nav_about_mc, nav_services_mc, nav_contact_mc).
figure 8
10. We can now delete the layer we are no longer using and rename the one with all of our buttons: nav buttons.
11. Out on frame 25, add a frame (F5 or right click > Insert Frame).
figure 9
12. For each nav item, give it an instance name. Start with the home nav button and name it: home_btn
Do the same for every button (about_btn, services_btn, contact_btn).
figure 10
13. Lock the nav buttons layer then create a new layer and title it: home content.
14. Add two more layers. Title the top one “actions” and the middle one “labels”. These will be used for our ActionScript and our timeline markers for each section.
figure 11
15. On frames 8, 17 and 25 insert blank keyframes on the actions and labels layers.
figure 12
16. Lock the actions layer.
17. We now need to label our sections. First, on frame 1, we will name this section “home”. Click on the first frame on the labels layer. Then, down in the properties panel you’ll find a place to define the Frame Label.
figure 13
18. Give it a label of “home”. Then go to frame 8 and label it “about”; frame 17 label “services”; frame 25 label “contact”.
figure 14
19. So because we will need Flash to stop at each of these sections, we need to add a stop action (stop();) for each. Press Control + F9 or go to Window > Actions to pull up your ActionScript panel. In the actions layer on each of the blank keyframes type into your ActionScript Panel the stop action.
figure 15
20. Now we need some elements for each section. Lock all the layers and create a new layer in between layers nav buttons and labels and title it: home content.
21. On the home content layer, add a title and body content.
figure 16
22. Select both text items, create a new movie clip symbol (F8 or right click, Convert to Symbol). Name the movie clip: home_content
23. Insert a blank keyframe on the 2nd frame.
figure 17
24. In your library panel, find the movie clip you just created and duplicate the symbol, renaming it to: about_content
25. Double click on the about_content movie clip. Change the title to ABOUT.
26. Go back to the main timeline by clicking on Scene 1.
figure 18
27. We now need to create another layer and name it: about content
28. Insert a blank keyframe on the same frame as our “about” label (frame 8).
29. Drag the new about_content movie clip onto the stage.
30. Insert a blank keyframe on frame 9.
figure 19
31. Repeat steps 24 through 30 for both of the remaining sections.
figure 20
32. Now for the good stuff! Click on the first frame on our actions layer. We now need to tell Flash what we want to happen when the user clicks on one of our buttons.
33. Since we are going to use our movie clips as buttons, we need to tell each of these instances to be buttons. (change each)
figure 21
34. In the Actions panel, type:
import flash.display.MovieClip;
This will allow us to give actions to the movie clips on our stage. You really don’t need to know anything more than it is necessary to have at the top of your code.
35. Now to create the function that will navigate us to the proper sections when we click one of the buttons. Type this into your Actions panel (on that same frame, frame 1 of the main timeline).
function clickHome (event:MouseEvent):void {
trace("home button clicked");
};
36. Now that we have a function that will tell us when the home button is clicked, we need to link it to the actual click event. In order to do that we need to add above our function a line of code. This line of code will add an event listener to the home button and call our clickHome() function when it is clicked.
home_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, clickHome);
function clickHome (event:MouseEvent):void {
trace("home button clicked");
};
37. Let’s test the movie and click the home button.
figure 22
38. It worked!
39. Okay so now we need to be able to do this for every one of the buttons. So we need to create a function for each section and add the call on the CLICK event:
about_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, clickAbout);
function clickAbout (event:MouseEvent):void {
trace("about button clicked");
};
figure 23
40. Test your movie again. Notice now you get results every time you click one of the buttons?
41. From here we need to tell it what to do when we click on a button. Currently it just gives us a trace(); to let us know it is working. But what we need is to tell it to go to the specific sections, which is where gotoAndStop(); comes in! In between the curly brackets (“{” and “}”) in our clickAbout() function type:
gotoAndStop('about');
The function should now look like this:
function clickAbout (event:MouseEvent):void {
trace("about button clicked");
gotoAndStop('about');
};
If you remember, we labeled our sections on the timeline using the Frame Label in our Properties panel. These are now coming in handy. For each of our functions we need to tell it to go to the specific sections.
figure 24
42. Test your movie. You have just completed creating a simple Flash website!
Addendum:
Change your button instance names to match that of the labels for each section: take off the “_btn”. The code below will use the instance names of each button in order to find the corresponding frame label and navigate there.
stop();
import flash.display.MovieClip;
home.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, gotoMySection);
about.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, gotoMySection);
services.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, gotoMySection);
contact.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, gotoMySection);
// this function takes user to specified section or frame label
function gotoMySection (event:MouseEvent):void {
gotoAndStop(event.target.name);
trace(event.target.name + " was clicked");
};
Download these files w/ updated code
3 Responses to “Building a simple website using ActionScript 3.0”
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Nik says:
Thank you so much for your excellent tutorial-you made it so much clearer than the lecturers at my university do!
You should throw up a working demo on your blog!