MooTools

The foundation of every great open source project is its community. The MooTools Team creates the base framework code but it’s all of you that take the framework and build outstanding plugins. These are just some of the new developments floating around the MooTools community.

12 Steps to MooTools Mastery

Jacob Thornton’s NetTuts article, 12 Steps to MooTools Master, is a high-level introduction to the MooTools JavaScript framework. The informative article touches on such MooTools topics as Mutators, Prototypal Inheritance, custom events, binding, and more. This tutorial probably isn’t for the complete beginner, but is a good place to start for people still relatively new to MooTools and those considering it for the first time.

http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/javascript-ajax/12-steps-to-mootools-mastery/

Meio.Autocomplete

Meio.Autocomplete is the latest plugin from MooTools Contributor Fábio M. Costa. Fábio’s class is packed full of options and events, making it one of the most flexible MooTools Autocomplete plugin available. Great work Fábio!

http://mootools.net/forge/p/meio_autocomplete

DynamicTextarea

DynamicTextarea is a MooTools class that resizes TEXTAREA elements as the user types. DynamicTextarea boasts numerous options and events for maximum control over chosen TEXTAREAs.

http://mootools.net/forge/p/dynamictextarea

Array.Math

Array.Math is an outstanding set of Math methods you can add to JavaScript’s native Array object. Need to find the sum of numbers in an array? Need to normalize elements in an array? Need to get the vector length of an array of numbers? Be sure to download Array.Math! Kudos to Arian Stolwijk for his excellent work!

http://mootools.net/forge/p/array_math

LazyLoader

LazyLoader is a unique MooTools plugin created by David Chan which allows you to defer loading of MooTools classes until they are needed. This is especially helpful when building large web applications. LazyLoader is very easy to use and implement.

http://mootools.net/forge/p/lazyloader

Locate

Locate is a Geolocation plugin authored by Christopher Beloch. Christopher’s plugin taps into the power of HTML5 and offers a few useful options and events to control the Locate instance.

http://mootools.net/forge/p/locate

Keep Up the Good Work!

These are just a few of the great MooTools plugins floating around the MooTools community recently. Keep up the good work and we look forward to featuring your plugins in future posts!

Hello everyone,

I’m really excited and pleased to announce that my presentation “MooTools as a General Purpose Application Framework” which I delivered at the FOSDEM is now available on YouTube.

If you are not able to watch the HD-Version you can download the slides here.

Thanks again to the FOSDEM team for inviting me and for giving us such a big platform to present the MooTools project. If I could name one thing that I miss already about Brussels I would certainly say the waffles…

If you enjoyed this presentation and you want me or another developer from the MooTools Core Team to present at your conference feel free to contact us.

The foundation of every great open source project is its community. The MooTools Team creates the base framework code but it’s all of you that take the framework and build outstanding plugins. Here are some great plugins and tutorials that have been released recently.

MooTools Driver for Rails 3 Helpers

Rails 3 has been recently been released with the new capability to create your own javascript helpers; no longer will you need to use PrototypeJS. Kevin Valdek has created a MooTools helper so that you can use your favorite javascript framework with your chosen Ruby application. Kevin mentioned that his release isn’t complete at this point so feel free to contribute! Great work Kevin!

http://kevinvaldek.com/mootools-driver-for-rails-3-helpers

Moodit

MooTools now has its own Reddit topic. Be sure to share your favorite MooTools posts with all of your friends via Reddit!

http://www.reddit.com/r/mootools/

Moodoco

Moodoco is a purely web-based client-side MooTools documentation generator with HTML5 offline capabilities created by Lim Chee Aun. It uses the GitHub API to fetch all the Markdown documentation files from the repository and stores them offline in localStorage.

http://github.com/cheeaun/moodoco

MultiSelect

MultiSelect is a MooTools plugin from Blaž Maležič that turns your checkbox set into one single multi-select dropdown menu. This highly inventive plugin is a great way to make your select boxes much more appealing.

http://mootools.net/forge/p/mutiselect

Mif.Tree

Mif.Tree is a flexible tree-generation plugin that loads trees of information from javascript objects. You could, for example, output a JSON representation of a directory and view your server via HTML/javascript trees.

http://mootools.net/forge/p/mif_tree

Featured Blog: Ryan Florence

Ryan Florence’s blog has been doing an outstanding job of explaining complex MooTools concepts. Be sure to check out his blog!

http://ryanflorence.com/

Keep Up the Good Work!

These are just a few of the great MooTools plugins floating around the MooTools community recently. Keep up the good work and we look forward to featuring your plugins in future posts!

With the release of the Forge in December the way people contribute to MooTools has changed. The quality, amount, and the variety of plugins has amazed all of us. There are already more than 100 plugins available. In addition to that, Jacob Gube (SixRevisions) and MooTools contributor Garrick Cheung (@garrickcheung) have co-authored a new MooTools book aimed at JavaScript beginners.

Aaron has written an extensive review about MooTools in 2009. I expect 2010 to be an even better year for our Framework. As a first step we would like to invite you to meet part of the MooTools Team at the FOSDEM in February in Brussels where I will do an interesting talk about MooTools as a General Purpose Application Framework.

The real strength of MooTools, however, is you — the community. Here are a few of the many great MooTools plugins that were released during the month of December.

PassShark

Created by MooTools contributors Luis Merino (@Rendez) and Nathan Querido (@nfq), PassShark duplicates the iPhone’s method of password masking. A great method for making your passworld fields a bit easier to use.

• PassShark on the Forge
• Blog-Entry

MooPix

MooPix is not only a MooTools slideshow function but a method for accessing your public Flickr photos. Though no server side scripting is required, MooPix remains very small.

• MooPix Website

Notimoo

Notimoo is a simple Mac Growl clone made with MooTools. At only 4KB Notimoo is a lightweight but still provides the right amount of customization.

• http://www.paquitosoft.com/notimoo/

MGFX.Tabs 1.1

Sean McArthur has recently updated his popular Tabs class by making it more efficient and more flexible.

• MGFX.Tabs 1.1 on the Forge
• Blog Post and Demo

Fx.TransMorph

This Plugin by Lim Chee Aun (@cheeaun) allows a different transition for every property that is being animated.

• Fx.TransMorph on the Forge

Other Stuff Worth Mentioning

• Webkit Gradient Creator (double click to create new pins!)
• Scroll Clock
• MooTools FormValidator Tutorial
• Offline MooTools Docs Generator
• HTML5 Audio Player with MooTools
• WTFramework? 2.0 (must-have bookmarklet)

Keep Up the Good Work!

These are just a few of the great MooTools plugins floating around the MooTools community recently. Keep up the good work and we look forward to featuring your plugins in future posts!

If I was to highlight the single most important thing for MooTools in 2009, I would say without a doubt it’s been its community. This year has seen the involvement of many individuals from all over the world that have contributed their time, expertise, talent and charm. Our San Francisco & London hackathons are clear confirmation of this.

Today we’re introducing a tool that has been in the works for the past few months that we believe will change how our community collaborates forever. Meet the MooTools Forge.

The Problem

As a framework, you probably expect MooTools to be compact and provide you with the tools that solve most of your JavaScript problems easily and elegantly and that’s been our goal all along. But for all the other specific needs that your projects have, no matter what framework, you’ve probably found yourself googling for plugins or snippets before. No one wants to reinvent the wheel.

That Google search will probably return thousands and thousands of results. Many people have even approached the same problem in many different ways (try searching for a mootools slideshow plugin!). This distributed model, although relatively effective, represents problems for both users and developers.

For the users, it becomes hard to establish comparisons between the plugins as every developer will represent them differently on their websites. Sometimes it’s hard to find a demo, sometimes you just don’t know how to use the thing. Other times the website will be offline for a couple hours, or maybe you don’t know on what other components the plugin might depends to function.

But can we blame developers? Creating a plugin that you can distribute to people takes work. And for some of us, experience shows that writing documentation, uploading it to our cumbersome blog systems, preparing screenshots (and then upgrading them upon a new release!) can sometimes be even more difficult than writing the plugin itself. Still, there are some good reasons to consider releasing your code.

The Solution: for users

For people trying to find plugins, we wanted a simple interface with visual focus on what’s available. Going through lists of plugins whose names are not always that intuitive or descriptive is both boring and inefficient. You might find yourself opening dozens of tabs just to see what the plugin can potentially offer. We want to try and put all the information you need to make a choice right in one place.

While each plugin can have tags that you can browse, we also came up with a concise list of categories that group the most recurrent functions: Effects, Forms, Interface, Media, Native, Realtime, Request, Utilities, Widgets.

For plugins themselves, we wanted to make three basic tasks easy: seeing a demo, downloading, learning how to use. This is the result:

We believe it’s important as well to know who is behind the scenes. To see who is that guy or girl that spent the time to create that amazing piece of functionality that impressed your clients or boosted your website usability. As such, the MooTools Plugins repository comes with simple to tools support to allow you to stay in touch.

The solution: for developers

We’re very proud of how straightforward and efficient we’ve made it for developers to add plugins that:

• look great
• specify dependencies
• have descriptions with syntax highlighting
• are easy to maintain

We decided to integrate with GitHub, the social coding website, to enable developers to focus on the code and nothing else. By following a few simple guidelines, you’ll be able to deploy code to the source control repository (git), and then only click one button in our website: either the one to add it, or the one to update it.

In the following video, I’ll show you how I create an account, upload my plugin, and then update it in 30 seconds.

Conclusion

We hope you like this new website feature as much as we do, and we look forward to your involvement and contributions.

As an user of the system, if you see something off or have a suggestion, please drop us a note.

As the developer and maintainer of the project, I want to give my special thanks to Chris (for his help with Markdown parsing), Oskar (for his design help) and the Symfony project, for providing us with a great framework to build on, as well as the entire MooTools development team who helped find bugs and provided countless suggestions on how to make it better before we launched it.

But the plugin repository itself wouldn’t be anything without you - the MooTools Community. As much as the plugins catalog is for you, it must by definition be by you, too. As excited as we are to have this finally online, it doesn’t compare to our excitement to see what our awesome community comes up with every day.

On another note, the technology that empowers the Forge has been opensourced, for the use of any other open source project.

Happy hacking!