Quick Tip: How to Organize Your Flash Project Files
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Quick Tip: How to Organize Your Flash Project Files

on Feb 4th 2010 with 27 comments
Tutorial Details
  • Difficulty: Beginner

There are two good reasons for keeping your Flash project organized: first, it makes it easier to package up your output files for deployment; second, it stops coders and designers getting in each other’s way!

In this Quick Tip screencast, Daniel Apt demonstrates how to set up your project’s folders, and shows three standard ways of doing so.

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Daniel Apt is a Dutch 19-year-old web designer. He’s passionate about all forms of design, dance and bicycling. He’s studying Design for Graphic Communication at the London College of Communication.  

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  • http://www.cyphers-x.de Carsten

    Cool, thanks!

  • http://www.solemone.de solemone

    Quick and great! Thanks

  • phil

    Nice screencast, thanks.

  • http://www.elquefaltaba.es/qborreda.html qborreda

    Ok, my input into this .. just so you guys have another option

    For each client at my Work folder, I would typically have at least the following:

    c:/WORK/ClientName/..

    /_orig/ -> originals in flash
    /_psd/ -> mockups in psd or png (fireworks)
    /_assets/ -> files to import into the flash project (.pngs, .gifs .. )
    /_docs/ -> client specs, campaign specs, etc ..
    /_web/ -> the final product

    If a project goes on for long, and requires a lot of versioning, I sometimes did a /_backup/ folder or /_versions/ with zipped content.

    I would keep my classes at the same folder where my .fla files are. Can’t see the difficulty in locating them and open them from the same folder.

    Just my two cents.

    Good screencast, Daniel!

    • Daniel Apt
      Author

      Wow qborreda, you took organizing to the next level!

      Interesting setup, just one question, why do you use an underscore before the folder names?

      I myself use Git to keep track of older versions.

      • http://www.elquefaltaba.es/qborreda.html qborreda

        I work on PC, and everything named with an underscore before it, appears higher on the folder lists. Sometimes, you need to have some other folders there, or work colleagues mess up with the working folder (on a large company environment), so I like the primary, most important folders, to be the first to be seen.

  • http://www.mediadivinitydesign.com Moses Adetola

    Great tips thanks

  • André

    it´s a nice work…

    I just organize all in server, i test everything in a server-side before publish it for whole web, for example…

    d:/server/client/- FLA
    d:/server/client/- PSD
    d:/server/client/- DOCS

    and so on, the output .swf i send directly to the client folder, in flash i just put ../file.swf, so it goes directly to d:/server/client

    This way when i test it in browser, i just type:
    http://localhost/client
    For me, it´s the more organized way i´ve found, since most of my websites contains server-side script too, when i send it via FTP i just dont send any folder that starts with -, they will be always the first folders…

    But everbody has their own way to organize, but this is my two cents…

    Great screencast Daniel, it´s sad the quality i cant see much thing but i understand what you did, personnaly i prever written tutorials wich are easyer to read and if you need to go back to any part is easyer too…

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  • http://eddie-moore.com Ed Moore

    Hey,

    Some good tips there.

    I usually organise my files into source and release folders. Just like the src and deploy folders you mentioned in your tut.

    Me and two other guys have actually built an extension for Flash that will create all your files and folders for you, so you don’t need to keep creating them from scratch each time you start a project. The structure is setup via an xml file and is really customisable.
    You can grab it from http://code.google.com/p/flashstructurecreator/
    Give it a shot and see if it will speed up your initial process of crating files and folders.

    Ed

  • Bruno Crociquia

    Since workflows are all subjective to the individual i thought i would share how our flash development team works so you can have yet another opinion:

    client/
    |-> projectname/
    |————> flash_team/
    | |—> src/
    | |—> assets/
    | |—> libs/
    | |—> deploy/
    |————> client_contents/
    | |—> area_name/imgs
    | |—> area_name/txts
    |————> fonts/
    |————> design_team/
    |—>psds/
    |—>jpgs/

  • http://www.riverflowing.com Mike

    Thanks for this. I was looking for more information about this process. I often hear about how code is organized using reverse domain names. Surprised there was no mention of this naming convention (i.e. com/yourname/project.

    Thoughts how this relates to this tutorial?

    • Daniel Apt
      Author

      Hi Mike,

      Yes, code is often placed in this reverse domain name order. But I would then place that code folder (com/yourname/project) inside the code folder.

      Of course, as I’ve said before, there’s no right way to organize your files, but that’s what I would do ;-)

    • http://www.elquefaltaba.es/qborreda.html qborreda

      Mike, that probably refers to the way the classes are archived.

      This is only meant to be a way to have different classes from different packages named the same way, and not mixed when you code.

      Say you have all your classes in one folder, if you have two different projects in which you’d need a form.as class, one would overwrite the other. On the other hand, you could be having

      /classes/com/client1/forms/form.as
      and
      /classes/com/client2/forms/form.as
      both with the same name and a reference to the project they are used in.

  • Jan van Helden

    Chuck Norris puts all files in one folder ;d

    • Bruno Crociquia

      haha good one :)

    • André

      Chuck Norris just look at the screen, and all the files are done by itself, WITHOUT OPENING FLASH

  • Rubén Rojas

    Hey excellent tutorial, is very important the order to hour of work.

    One Question: I like this wallpaper. Where can i find?

  • jmarreros

    nice screencast, thanks

  • http://www.bloggerzbible.blogspot.com/ Bloggerzbible

    Thanks for the tip

  • http://as3apex.com/ Josh Chernoff

    I have seen src/bin/lib as the standard in the industry for over 3 years now.

    I would think that promoting only one type of organization would be a better idea to helping people follow standards in the industry.

    Flex builder, Flash develop and a few other Flash/Flex IDE’s out there all use the src/bin/lib standard and that is what I tell people to use when they ask.

    Regardless of the specific standard, I think it’s a great idea to try to get people to use any standard as it will only help our industry.

    Also when Flash CS5 comes out you will see that there is a new option to explode your fla into a folder for version control and there is a bin and lib folder in that.

    - Josh Chernoff – AS3 Apex Adobe User Group Manager.

  • http://paloji.com sandesh ramesh patil

    thanks man . for u r help.

  • #AIKAH

    Gret tips thanks

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  • Mark Joseph

    yeah.. very organized.. thanks for the video Dan!

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  • http://www.pressnine.com Frank McCright

    As long as I’ve been using Flash I still had to do a search to see how others organized their files. Great tutorial for brushing up.

  • http://borealismedia.ru Andrey Stepanov

    Some really useful minor tips.
    Thank you a lot.