Hi Gang,

I’ve been picking up more and more chatter regarding the imminent release of Mootools 1.2b and I keep getting emails and whatnot asking about CNET’s codebase, which works in 1.11, but not so well in 1.2 (even with the Mootools compatibility layer).

We’re working on it and we’ve made a lot of progress. We’ve now migrated ALL of our code and have only the 3rd party scripts we support (Slimbox and Autocompleter) left to port. But even then we’re not ready to release it – or even post a release candidate – until we’ve done some QA.

So this post is just to tell you all that, yes, we’re porting it all to 1.2 and that it’s not that far off. You can, if you like, browse the documentation for the new scripts here:

http://clientside.cnet.com/docs/Core

We’ve rearranged things a bit (more on that in a later post), renaming some classes and methods and whatnot. We’ll also have a compatibility layer that should make our code work with Mootools 1.11, as well.

Other plans include a download page much like the Mootools download page (finally!), specs (unit tests), and demos.

Stay tuned; we’ll have a release candidate for you to start playing with in another week or so.

-aaron

The CNET JS code includes references to various assets – images and a few css files and at least one flash (swf) file. I include references in the javascript so that these things “just work” when you use them.

First and foremost, our libraries are designed for us to develop with, and making that process easy is our main concern. The problem is when you want to use these scripts somewhere other than CNET (or for local development).

Well, now you can. Just download the assets here:

http://code.google.com/p/cnetjavascript/downloads/list

Then use http://cnetjavascript.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/setAssetHref.js to set the location of the assets. Voila.

Hi gang,

Got some new goodies for you in the ol’ svn today. First, the bugs fixed:

• fixPNG: slight tweaks and debugging lines added
• modalizer: cleaned up style syntax a little
• stickyWinFx: updated convention for options management to current methods
• jsonp: added a timeout/retry system, added some dbug lines
• Fx.Sort: fixed a bug in IE6
• element.setPosition: now correctly restores display, visibility, and position values to their previous state,
• element.forms: reverted (and tested) cursor/selection management; IE6 was acting up. fixed a doc typo
• element.pin: fixed a positioning bug
• element.position: now supports elements inside positioned parents (it calculates the relevant offsets); added support for fixed positioned elements;

And thew new widgets:

• Fx.Marquee – a little Fx plugin for announcing status messages
• IconMenu – a menu for managing a bunch of icons in a scrollable workspace
• MooScroller – like regular overflow scrollbars that come with your browser when you use overflow: auto, except done in javascript so the scrollbar is 100% css styleable

Have fun.

I just did a little clean up and released Fx.SmoothMove. This functionality used to be a part of Element.setPosition but now it’s an extension to Fx.Styles.

Mootools has a convention that I was breaking here (the same reason prompted me moving Fx.SmoothShow into Fx and out of Element). Basically, it is a general rule in the Mootools dev team never to create one-off instance of classes, especially in Native object extensions (Element in particular). Element.setPosition had an option (smoothMove: true) that would transition the position of the element to the new location smoothly (i.e. using Fx.Styles). But it didn’t return this to you, so every time you used it you created a new instance of Fx.Styles. Aside from this being wasteful, it also means that if you attempt to do this behavior while another is still in process, instead of canceling the previous one and starting a new one, both would run, causing your element to jump around until they both finished.

This is bad form and I should be given three lashes or something. I figured all this out after I’d written a lot of it and have just now gotten around to cleaning it up. But hey, as long as we all learned something… right?

See Fx.SmoothMove in action.

Update: I keep switching out Fx.SmoothShow and Fx.SmoothMove; this note as about the latter… Fixed the typos…

The CNET libraries have, until recently, required that you download a version of Mootools from our svn repository or use the dev version of Mootools. This was before Mootools 1.1 released, and it had some dependencies on code that wasn’t in 1.0.

As Mootools 1.1 is now out, you should download it from Mootools.net. I’ve removed Mootools from our SVN so now the only thing there is our code. You’ll find clientside.moo.v1.1.packed.js in the /cat directory; this is a copy of ALL of Mootools 1.1 + ALL of our code. It’s a big file, but it’s complete if you just want to fool around with it.