CMS integration?

Q&A about the latest versions
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Velociped
Posts: 22
Joined: Sun Jul 17, 2011 11:45 am
Location: Switzerland
Contact:

Hi,
a question to all who sell their panoramas! :)

What is the best way to integrate a flash-panorama in a CMS-webite like Joomla, Wordpress, Typo3,...?

My customers often only have access to the admin web-interface and don't have the knowledge (or permission) to upload files by using an FTP-Client.

Until now I provide a minimal html-page with all the Javascript-stuff and let the customer display this page inside an iframe. He only has to set the correct path according to his system and copy-paste the iframe code into his CMS.
But this only works, if he is able to upload the panorama-files first and knows about the path.

A new idea came up, to host all the panoramas on my own server and only provide the ready-to-use iframe snippets to the customers. Drawbacks: they don't have any control an I might run into troubles with my provider due to excessive data-traffic if the panos are displayed on heavily frequented sites!

How do you handle embedding the panoramas on your customers CMS?
Is there a native flash support in major CMS, including the fullscreen option?

Regards,
Guy
manxjon
Posts: 22
Joined: Fri Nov 19, 2010 3:41 pm

I use wordpress to manage my panos, I set up a custom post type for panoramas although I actually just upload the files to an Amazon S3 bucket then store the filename in the database and then have written plug-ins to allow me to add hotspots and pan intial pan tilt etc. On the S3 bucket I set permission so that files can only be loaded via my domain. I then allow paying customers to embed the panorama page in there own site via an iframe or as a full screen.

I only enable client domains to load the content in an iframe and the ones that are not 'on the list' I used a frame breaker so that if they try and load the pano in a frame it 'escapes' and just loads my website. Key advantages of this method are that despite clients having cheap hosting providers my panos load very fast and clean and perhaps more importantly I have central control over the code used to embed panos I create, so when advances in the player are made I should be able to update all instances rather than contact third party developers and give them new code as I used to have to do in the past which gets expensive for the client.

The biggest problem is that Pano2VR is not really built with developers in mind and so a lot of assumptions are made as to how you want to deploy the panoramas and you have to unpick the xml and do a fair bit of legwork to get it running.
Velociped
Posts: 22
Joined: Sun Jul 17, 2011 11:45 am
Location: Switzerland
Contact:

Thanks Manxjou!

Working with iframes seems to be a good idea. :)

But what about the costs for an Amazon S3 hosting? My customers run some busy touristic or official websites. I'm a bit afraid that costs quickly get out of hand!
I'm also not sure, if they agree to show external content on their site without their control.

Does anybody know an easy way to integrate a panorama in a CMS?
Guy
manxjon
Posts: 22
Joined: Fri Nov 19, 2010 3:41 pm

Amazon S3 is very cheap and very fast the only downside is that like all Amazon Web Services though it is not the easiest thing to set up.
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