Here is how you list posts from a particular category in a wordpress page template, right before the “while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ” call add:

<?php query_posts('category_name=name&showposts=100'); ?>
<?php /*  change name to the name of the category posts you want to display   */  ?>

The reason the wordpress function query_posts() breaks the sidebar template is because its not a simple database query collecting posts from a specific category, but its resetting the query object as a whole to reflect a normal category query.

So to fix the sidebar template you have to go with creating a new query object through WP_Query() in your page template. So here is the before and after of the loop in a page template.

Page Template Loop BEFORE:

<?php query_posts('category_name=name&showposts=100'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
       <!-- do stuff ... -->
<?php endwhile; ?>

Page Template Loop AFTER:

<?php $cat_posts = new WP_Query('category_name=name'); ?>
<?php if($cat_posts->have_posts()) : ?>
         <?php while($cat_posts->have_posts()) : $cat_posts->the_post(); ?>
                 <!-- do stuff ... -->
         <?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Hope that helps someone, cya.

So to load your XML you have to create your load and request variables and then you should create a few event listeners for progress and complete events, like this:

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var loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
var requestURL:URLRequest = new URLRequest(xmlfilename.xml);
 
//create progress and complete event listeners for the loader, and load the urlrequest
loader.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, getBytesLoop);
loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, loadXML);

Now in your loadXML function all you have to do is figure out where the xml file actually ends, and then index that spot and then cut the rest of the string out with the substring() command. Here is how you do that.

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//function loadxml loads the xml and handles assigning to places
function loadXML(e:Event):void {
 
	var dataString:String = e.target.data;
	var finalString:String = "";
	var endofString:uint;
 
        //find out where the end of the xml file is, however your set it up it should be the last closing tag, this one is </settings>
	endofString = dataString.indexOf("</settings>", 0);
 
	//cut out the good part of the xml using substring, then use 0 as your starting point to where you got your endOfString
        //make sure to add whatever amount you need to be at the end of the your last closing tag, </settings> has 11 characters in it so +11
	finalString = dataString.substring(0, endofString+11);
 
	//then assign the finalstring to your XML variable
	try {
		var theXML:XML = new XML(finalString);
	} catch (e:TypeError) {
		//loader.load(requestURL);
		trace("A TypeError has occurred : \r\t" + e);
	}
 
//then go on with setting up your XMLLists so you can access the data how you want
}

So hopefully this helps those out there that are getting weird parsing errors when trying to load multiple XML files. I know I tried finding the solution out on the web and couldn’t so that’s why I wrote this, if it helps you out please leave a comment.

Cya

This error occurs when your flash file is trying to get data from a different domain and it can’t because of security reasons on their server. The usual fix for this is to create a crossdomain.xml file that allows access from other websites to use the data on yours, but the problem with that is if you don’t host that site you want the data from then how could you create or update the crossdomain.xml file on their server.

I did find a work around for it though! Not sure if its “the right way to do it” but it does work.

Here is the solution, I copy that url of the feed I want the data from, go to my feedburner account and create a feedburner feed of the same feed. If you don’t know what feedburner is then you should definatly check it out. You basically can sign up for feedburner if you have a google account already. Anyway, after you get the feedburner feed of the data you want you can view it. Then if you want to see the xml version of the Feedburner Feed, you can just add  “?format=xml” onto the end of the url they give you, and this is the normal RSS 2.0 feed that we are wanting.

This is the data you want, because its not on the security problematic website. The next thing I ran into was getting the images to display in the news ticker as well. I kept getting the same error but if I dismissed the errors then they still worked. So I used a try-catch clause to get the error and throw it if it gets one. Here is an example of that code:

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function imageLoaded(e:Event):void {
	try {
                //make the image into a bitmap and smooth it
		var image:Bitmap = e.target.content as Bitmap;
		image.smoothing = true;
 
		//resizes the image
		e.target.content.width = 55;
		e.target.content.height = 35;
 
	} catch(error:Error) {
		trace("Error catch: " + error);
	}
}

This is called from an event listener when loading it in using a loader object, that looks like this:

imageLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.INIT, imageLoaded);

So basically it worked after this, and the images even showed up without showing the error. The only problem is that the images don’t get resized because they can’t be loaded into the swf memory. Here are the examples: the one on the left is the broken example, it can’t get the information it wants to so it just keeps trying to load it. The example on the right shows the fix. (You have to view them in IE so the error warnings appear, another thing to hate about IE. :/ )

Any thoughts or comments are encouraged,
Cya

So add a movieclip to the stage that is the same size of the stage, but make the color’s alpha zero. Make sure the instance name is “bg” then in the actionscript add this:

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    //import library files
    import flash.display.StageAlign;
    import flash.display.StageScaleMode;
    import flash.events.Event;
 
    //reset the background movieclip function
    resetBGsize();
 
    //set the stage scalemode and alignment to no scale and top left
    stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
    stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;
 
    // add an event listener to the stage for when it is resized
    stage.addEventListener(Event.RESIZE, onResizeStage);
 
    //onresizestage function for the event listener, calls resetBGsize
    function onResizeStage(e:Event):void {
       resetBGsize();
    }
 
    //resetbgsize function resizes the background movieclip and centers it
    function resetBGsize():void {
       bg.width = stage.stageWidth;
       bg.height = stage.stageHeight;
       bg.x = stage.stageWidth / 2 - bg.width / 2;
       bg.y = stage.stageHeight / 2 - bg.height / 2;
    }

Hope this helps someone out.

Cya