MooTools

One of the most useful and common part of MooTools is its Events Type. There are two Event usages: Element and Class. Element.Events is probably the most known because that’s probably one of the first things you’ve used when you started using MooTools. Furthermore, MooTools More 1.3 Events.Pseudos has been introduced to give even more power and control over Events and with Event Delegation can give your page a massive performance boost. This blog post will give you a deeper insight into all components.

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The MooTools team is very happy to announce a simultaneous update of both Core and More repositories. The past year was amazing for us. We had a great hackathon in London, we gave you MooTools 1.3, added a lot of new people to our team and improved everything around the code. The results of the MooTools survey clearly showed that we are doing the right things and we intend to make MooTools even better in 2011. We spent the past weeks fixing bugs and adding new features on both projects. This is what’s new:

Changes

• Lots (and by that I mean LOTS) of documentation improvements, clarifications and cleanups
• Updated Slick to 1.1.5 and improved the speed of our Slick selector engine
• Added delegation support for submit, focus, blur, reset, change and select events in MooTools More
• If available the native JSON methods are now used in JSON.decode and JSON.encode
• Multiple Pseudos click:relay(a):once (demo)
• Two new pseudo events: :throttle and :pause
• Added String.truncate to String.Extras in More
• More than two hundred changes to increase the stability of both Core & More

I am also pleased to announce our newest addition to the MooTools More team, Jacob Thornton, who is a great developer, currently working for Twitter. He has put a substantial amount of work into making MooTools More even better.

Be sure to check out the updated demos in our new demos section.

Get it!

• Download MooTools Core 1.3.1; Build MooTools Core 1.3.1
• Build MooTools More 1.3.1.1
• Fork / clone MooTools 1.3.1 from GitHub, and build it yourself with Packager.
• Read the commit logs to see precisely what has changed.
• Browse the Documentation for Core & More.
• Please report any bugs you can find on Lighthouse, our bug tracker.

Last month we held the MooTools User’s Survey and we would like to thank you all for participating and sharing your ideas. We received more than 700 submissions! Here is a summary of the results and our thoughts about them.

Core

Most of you think MooTools Core is fine as it is, with an obvious exception: Swiff has to go. This change has already been planned for the next major release. There are several good ideas about what we could add to Core: element shortcuts (.hide() and .show(), for example), a few Types from MooTools More, Event Delegation, Pseudo Events, and cowbells! In short, we would like to keep MooTools Core a compact, modular, object oriented framework. Specific UI plugins, for instance, would be a better fit for MooTools More or maybe the Forge.

More

Many of you supplement MooTools Core with MooTools More (96%) but are also equally divided whether More should contain UI plugins or if those should be in the Forge. Most of you (60%) like to see more abstraction APIs, such as enhancements to Core. That’s probably why Types and Drag are the most popular More components. HtmlTable is the biggest candidate for removal (43%) followed by Accordion (34%) (ndVP: yey!). In general, you had many ideas about what to add to MooTools More, such as specific UI plugins, support for HTML5 features, geolocation, and storage.

Forge

The Forge is pretty popular, about 65% of respondents use the Forge to a find plugin. About 11% have contributed to the Forge with new plugins. Respondents shared great ideas for improving the Forge, including: comments, ratings, better search, featured plugins or a combined (packager-web) download page which selects all dependencies.

API Documentation

A very important part of MooTools is the online API documentation. Most of you think they are pretty good, but are also put off by the lacks of examples. We’ve heard you and that’s why we responded with our fancy new demos which we released a few weeks ago! Our plan is to add new demos which we will use as additions to the docs. You will find links from the docs to the demos, which you can play with thanks to the jsfiddle integration. We don’t have demos of each part of Core or More yet, so if you want to help, you can fork the repository and add new ones, or just ping us (@astolwijk or @fakedarren) with new jsfiddles. Another popular idea that we particularly liked is the addition of a comment system to the API documentation.

I’d like to point out that you can easily start hacking on the docs if you feel so inclined. Just make sure you have a github account, fork mootools-core or mootools-more, browse to the Docs folder and select a .md file. Github has awesome online editing features, so you can work without knowing anything about GIT! If you modify a file we will see it via the network view and will include your fix into the main repository.

Upgrade to MooTools 1.3

We are really happy to see that the release of MooTools 1.3 went smoothly and most of you are already in love with the new MooTools. One point for improvement would be to put the upgrade tutorials on the wiki in a more prominent place on the mootools.net website.

The lucky winner of the T-Shirt

Congratulations to the lucky winner of the awesome MooTools t-shirt. You’ll receive it shortly, and we sincerely hope you’ll wear it with pride!

In conclusion, thanks for all the “MooTools FTW!” responses, the cowbells suggestions, and other great feedback you guys sent us. We <3 you.

We’ve been beavering away here in MooTools Towers looking though our recent survey results (more feedback coming soon) and one of the things that was obvious you guys and gals wanted was new demos.

So! Check out our new demos. We hope you like them!

We’re also delighted to be able to include full jsFiddle support, so you can easily view, edit and generally play with our new demos easily!

The entire demo runner is also available on our GitHub repository; so if you can run PHP it should be super-simple for you to get them up and running.

Do you have any demos you think we should add? Let us know in the comments! Or, fork it, and send us a pull request :)

We love our new demos and hope you do too!

The community and the MooTools users are very important for MooTools and its development. Therefore we would love to hear who you are and how you are using MooTools. You could do this by this survey. It will take about five minutes and none of the questions are required.

The purpose of this survey is to help us prioritize what the development team spends its time on. We want to make MooTools as useful for you as we can. Some questions are more explicit than others, relating to where we put things or what features we should focus on more or less. Armed with this information we can dedicate our resources to the things that matter most to you.

Because we think your opinion is valuable, we’ll be giving something in return. You can win a MooTools™ Shirt. Maybe you will look just as awesome as Tim soon!

The survey will be open for two or three weeks. After that time we will compile some sort of conclusion from the results and share it with you.

So head over to the survey and let your opinion count!

Update: I’ve just closed the survey. A huge thank you for the awesome responses!