I have been working on a project where I needed a ListBox that displays multiple lines of information per row. The user must select from a list of offices, but many of the office names are the same and the only way to distinguish one office from the other is by the office address. Because a ListBox does not allow multiple lines in each row, I decided to create the imMultiLineList jQuery plugin. This plugin will turn any div into a multi-line multi-select list. And because I need to interact with the plugin, I decided to create it using an Object Oriented approach.

The imMultiLIneList plugin is fairly simple to use. Multiple items can be added to the list ajaxally using a JSON object, but the plugin will also allow single items to be manually added.

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I added a new photo gallery to galleries.digitalvilliage.com. I created the Photo Gallery widget using Dojo Toolkit about a year ago for a project that I have been working on. I recently updated to give it more options than I needed for my project.

The gpDojoGallery widget can be set to display thumbnail images in the center, left, right, top, or bottom of the page. When the thumbnails are set to the center position, the dojox.image.Lightbox module can be used to display the large image.

The widget receives a JSON object that contains the image information (location, width, height, etc). I store the information using dojo.data.ItemFileReadStore, so it was easy to add a pics-per-page option just be limiting the number items to be read within the store.

if (this.picsPerPage) {
	request = imageStore.fetch({onBegin: startFetch, onError: fetchFailed, onComplete: initGallery, start: 0, count: this.picsPerPage});
}  else {
	request = imageStore.fetch({onBegin: startFetch, onError: fetchFailed, onComplete: initGallery});
}

The gpDojoGallery widget was fairly simple to create, but it has enough options to be a very versatile photo gallery. You can view demos on my digitalvilliage.com site. The widget (and demos) can be downloaded from GitHub.

I’m working on a new project that uses Dojo Toolkit and DJango. I haven’t started on the DJango back-end yet because I first need to create a few Dojo widgets. The first widget that I created is gpDojoPortfolio. As the name suggests, this widget will display a portfolio. Each item in the portfolio slides into view using the dojo.fx module.

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When the web20.digitalvilliage site was nearly complete, I wanted to add a contact form. I like the feedback tabs that I have been seeing on websites recently (displayed on the right or left of the page), so I decided to build one. I was already using a JQuery UI theme on the site, so I decided to create a JQuery UI widget so that the color scheme of the feedback form would match the color scheme on the site.

This ui.imFeedBack widget is extremely versatile. The feedback tab can be placed on the right or left and can even be displayed as a dialog.

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I needed to add Dropdown menus to a site that a designed using Drupal. I found a few modules (Nice Menus, etc) that would enable me to easily add dropdown menus to my site, but I wanted to use the CSS Drop-Down Menu Framework that I discussed in a previous post. With a little help from JQuery, I was able to add dropdown menus to my site without having to use a Drupal module.

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I finally found time to add my imRichEditor widget (a Dojo widget that integrates TinyMCE) to my demo site. I built my demo site using CodeIgniter and I had to figure out the best way to integrate/call the Dojo files.

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As a developer, I hate writing similar code for the same process over and over again. Just like highly optimized database design, developers should always try to write code as efficiently as possible.

I’m working on a project where I use YUI and CakePHP to fill multiple combo boxes on a page using Json data. At first, I wrote separate code with the same functionality for each combo box. Every time I needed to change the functionality, I had to change it for each combo box. After doing this multiple times, I decided to combine the functionality on both the front-end (YUI) and the back-end (CakePHP).

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I’ve been upgrading an Intranet application that I created for a client. I created the front-end using YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library) and I am working on migrating the back-end to CakePHP. After setting up CakePHP, my first step of integrating YUI with CakePHP is retrieving data ajaxally. The application was already using YAHOO.util.Connect to retrieve the data, but I had to change my parsing code due to the format of the Json data that is returned by CakePHP.

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Someone just sent me a message asking me to update my imBannerRotater plugin because they were receiving a parseerrormessage with JQuery 1.4.

I tested the plugin with JQuery 1.4 and I too received the parseerror message. I knew immediately that the problem was with the Json record that was returned via an ajax request. Looking at the json record, I noticed that quotes were placed around the value, but not the name/key, so I added the quotes:

// originally
{name: "joneil.jpg", url: "http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0005968/"}
 
// changed to
{"name": "joneil.jpg", "url": "http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0005968/"}

I tested and no longer received the parseerror message.

The reason I knew that the error was due to the json record is because I ran into a similar problem with YUI last week. I received a parse error with a json record because I used single quotes rather than double quotes. I thought it was odd (and I was a bit displeased).

Knowing about the problem with YUI and single quotes, I tested json object above using single quotes:

{'name': 'joneil.jpg', 'url': 'http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0005968/'}

I again received the parseerror message. So you must use double quotes. I went back and read the Json specs. It mentioned placing double quotes around the value, but did not mention anything about placing quotes (double or otherwise) around the the name/key. But YUI and JQuery 1.4 both require it so it must be required.

In my last post, I discussed the YUI imYUILogin widget that I created. In this post, I will demonstrate how to log in ajaxally using the imYUILogin widget with CakePHP and the AuthComponent. I’m assuming that you have already read the Simple ACL Controlled Application and have the AuthComponent configured correctly. I’m also assuming that you are familiar with the Yahoo User Interface Library.

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