Flash: Slide out menu

[Eclipse2003]

Hello. I have been volunteered by my church to do our website. I know some about website design but not much. I recently got Flash CS3 and thought that I would make a flash menu. I have attached the menu as a .pdf in this post. Here is what I am wanting to do. Please tell me if this is possible and if so, how? I have never used flash so you'll have to go slow for me.

I am going to have the picture actually be a flash slide show (I think I found tutorials on how to do this). For the menu, I would like if the user has their mouse over any of the buttons on the menu, the menu with the words slide to the left maybe an inch or so. Then, whichever word the mouse is over, will slide back to the right while everything else remains slid to the left. Does that make sense? If anyone at all can help me, that'd be great! Thanks guys!

[Eclipse2003]

Ok well it doesn't seem like anyone knows how to do what I want it to do so instead I am going to make it more simple. What about just having the slide show and each link go to a new page (Home, etc)? How hard is that to pull off? I know how to make the slide show by using motion tweens but how do make the menu and can they work together on the same flash file?

[aldernon]

I can help you with your second question. You want to use the getURL function. You can change it to on release, onclick, so on. This is a basic code that will open the page desired when the user releases their mouse button:

on(release) {
getURL(YOUR_URL, "_blank");
}

YOUR_URL is obviously the link you want to use.
blank specifies a new, blank page (its not generally a good idea to have users navigate away from your site, just keep that in mind.

If you would like the link to load in the same window, use this:

_parent

opposed to _blank


Flash has a massive online community. Google onclick and getURL for tutorials if you have questions.
(i hope this kinda helps)

[Eclipse2003]

Great, thanks a lot. So this will work OK with a flash slide show as well in the same banner? It won't mess up anything? Like I said, I am new with flash so I just want to make sure you can run two separate flash things in the same file. Thanks for the help.

[aldernon]

yeah, you can run as many as you like. just ALWAYS make back-ups.

Alot of flash sites today are all just one big file. The entire site is complied into one .swf

I really dont think theres a limit... *scratches head* :P

[Eclipse2003]

Ok so I created a button for Home where it is one color when it is normal, one when mouse over and one when clicked. I then went to the "hit" frame (not sure if that is the right term) and put a rectangle over the word Home which should be the hit box, right? But when I go to Test Movie the hit box is lower than where I put it. Any idea at all why this is?

[Eclipse2003]

Ok nevermind. I got that fixed. Thanks for the help. I haven't tried the links yet but I'll let you know if I have any trouble. Next step is figuring out how to create logins for members to view "members only" pages. I'll start googling that.