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Quicker, easier and more colourful!

If you've been hearing a lot about Rainbow Live lately, that's because it's quickly becoming one of the most popular CMS solutions for Flash designers and developers. It's fast, it's flexible and it's build specifically for Flash.

Unlike other Flash CMS solutions, Rainbow Live leaves the design of your site completely up to you. There's no ugly templates or limitations to the content you can choose to display.

What is Rainbow Live

Rainbow Live is an enhanced XML editor that works as a suprisingly effective CMS for Flash files.

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Why Rainbow Live?

Rainbow Live was specifically built for Flash based websites and components which typically use external XML data to provide their content.

No more mistakes

By using an intuitive visual approach, Rainbow Live minimises the chance of making mistakes and allows you to focus on the important part - the data.

Easy templates

The easy to use templating system makes repetitive data entry a quick and foolproof experience with automated image and file uploading as well as predefined node types.

Getting Started

When you launch Rainbow it will open with a new Project containing one root node. From here you can add children and set properties as you go.
The following legend gives a quick overview of the node buttons:

Legend

	The Move button allows you to drag and drop nodes, to change order and reparent nodes.
	The Expand button shows a nodes children.
	The Collapse button hides a nodes children.
	The Delete button deletes a node. All of the nodes children will also be deleted.
	The Lock button is used to lock the node from the user log-in. The Node will be visible, but there will be restrictions on what changes the user will be able to make.
	The Hide button is used to hide the node from the user log-in. All children of the hidden node will also be invisible.
	The Add Child button opens the Add Child Dialog and allows you to add a new blank node, or instance of a RBW template to a node.
	The Publish button is used to turn a nodes publish property on and off. This can be controlled by either the Admin or User log-ins. An unpublished node will not be exported to XML.
	The Properties button opens up the Nodes property window where you can edit attributes, text and child templates.

Preferences

In the Preferences section you can customise the behaviour of your Rainbow Live install. Items Marked with a red dot are required for the default FTP setup.

Registration

This is where you enter your registered Domain Key. Without a valid key you will not be able to upload or save your files and data.

domainkey - (required) You must purchase a valid Domain Key in order to use Rainbow Live

Files

This section relates to file assets uploaded via Rainbow, such as MP3s or PDFs

uploadfolder - this specifies the default location files will be uploaded to (excluding images). This setting can be overridden at the attribute level on a case-by-case basis.

Images

This section relates to image assets uploaded via Rainbow, such as JPG, GIF or PNG. These settings act as global defaults, they can be overridden at the attribute level on a case-by-case basis.

imagefolder - this specifies the default server location that images will be uploaded to, relative to the Rainbow.swf file
thumbfolder - this specifies the default server location that image thumbnails will be created in, relative to the Rainbow.swf file
thumbwidth - this specifies the width of the generated thumbnail
thumbheight - this specifies the height of the generated thumbnail
thumbattribute - specifies the name of the attribute automatically created to reference the generated thumbnail
thumbappend - specifies an appendix to add to the original image file name when creating it's thumbnail

Users

This section allows you to set the Admin and User details. Please note that the same password is used for both accounts.

adminname - specifies the user name for the admin account
username - specifies the user name for the user/client account
password - specifies the password to be used for both admin and user accounts

Projects

This section contains file and path information for your projects,templates and export data. You can also choose to turn pretty printing on for export data. All server locations are relative to the Rainbow.swf file.

templatesfolder - -specifies the server location of the templates folder
projectfolder - specifies the location of the active project folder
projectfilename - specifies the filename of the active project
exportfolder - specifies the server location of the export XML data file
exportfilename - specifies the name of the export XML data file
prettydata - true/false values turn pretty XML formatting on and off

FTP

This section contains options for FTP file transfer (the default). Code and Visual provide courtesy scripts that enable the FTP transfer of your files. This allows a domain on a static server to harness the power of Rainbow Live. You can choose to target your own custom FTP scripts is you wish, or turn FTP mode off all together by setting the "FTP" value to "false". This will then enable server/php mode which will require you to place PHP files on your server.
The red values are required for the minimum default Rainbow installation.

ftp - true/false values turn FTP mode on/off
ftpsavescript - specifies the target script to enable saving via FTP. The default value is set to Code and Visual's courtesy script.
ftplistscript - specifies the script used to list a folders contents over FTP. The default value is set to Code and Visual's courtesy script.
ftpuploadscript - specifies the script used to upload files via FTP. The default value is set to Code and Visual's courtesy script
ftpport - specifies the port to use for FTP connections
ftphost - specifies the address of the FTP server of your site
ftpmode - currently unused
ftpusername - specifies the user name of your FTP account
ftppassword - specifies the password of your FTP account

Server

This section allows you to upload, update and export from Rainbow Live using your own custom scripts. This is provided as an alternative to FTP transferral. Example php scripts are included in this package however they are supplied only as a courtesy and Code and Visual does not provide php support. To enable Server mode, set FTP mode to false.

dynamic - true/false turns query string based cache killing on/off
uploadscript - specifies the location of the custom file for uploading
updatescript - specifies the location of the custom file for project saving/updating
listscript - specifies the location of the custom file for listing server directory contents
settingsscript - currently unused

Site

This section is very important, in particular the rainbowfolder property which must be set for the minimum functional install of Rainbow Live.

url - specifies the web address Rainbow will launch when you click on the "View Site" button. The default setting is 'root' and will launch the root page of your web server
rainbowfolder - the relative path from your webserver root to the rainbow.swf file. This must be set to allow for proper loading, saving and export.

Templates

Templates allow you to reuse XML snippets, they can even be prepopluated with data.

To define a template in the Projects tab, simply select the node you wish to turn into a template, ans then select noce>save as template. This will open a dialog window prompting you to choose a name and location for the file. * NOTE, make sure the file extension of your template remains “.rbw”.

Alternatively you can construct a template from scratch in the Template section. The Templates section works in the same way as the Projects section, but allows you an extra work space so you don’t have to keep opening and closing projects. Once you have built your template, choose file>save to save your template to your hard drive.

Templates are a very powerful way of speeding up XML generation. They also help to prevent mistakes when reproducing many nodes of the same structure. Nesting templates is a way to create modular structures that you can quickly and easily edit.

To use a template in Rainbow – click the “Add Child” button on the node you want to add a template instance to. A drop down window will appear displaying all loaded templates, along with a “Load” option that will allow you to browse for templates on your hard drive.

Importing/Exporting XML

Although Rainbow is an XML editor, you don’t work directly on XML files. Instead there is a Rainbow Project filetype (.rbw) that contains all the information about your XML file and your preferences, such as publish states of different nodes.

You can import existing XML data via the file>import XML option. If your XML file is structured properly, Rainbow will have no trouble parsing it into a RBW project. Rainbow will automatically assign some properties as “feature” items so that you can quickly understand what each particular node represents without having to go into the node properties.

To export XML data from your RBW project choose file>export XML and choose a location for the output file.