MooTools

Last week we held our first IRC office hours in the #mootools channel on irc.freenode.net. Fifteen (15) MooTools team members were in attendance and we got a lot of responses from our community. We covered: sandboxing natives, namespacing, packaging, roadmap, MVC, and that I look like Sam from the Lord of the Rings.

This is a reminder that tomorrow (June 21st) we’re having another office hour and you’re cordially invited to join us.

Unlike last week, this week we’ll have a couple of questions ready to steer the conversation. This week we’ll talk about MooTools 2.0 and what you guys need to love MooTools even more. We’ll be taking names down as well, for those that would like to contribute.

Keep reading to learn the details.

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Starting next week, we’re going to be holding regular IRC office hours for MooTools developers in the #mootools channel on irc.freenode.net. Members of the MooTools team will be on hand to answer your technical questions.

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Today we announce the simultaneous release of MooTools Core 1.3.2 and More 1.3.2.1. This is mostly a bugfix release and does not contain many new features. The most important fix is within our selector engine, Slick, which failed in some cases where the selectors began with an operator (ex. ~div).

A new component has been added to MooTools More: Table. Table was slated to be added in MooTools Core 2.0, but we’re making it available in MooTools More now. Table is similar to the JavaScript object literal, but where an object can only have a scalar value (string or number) as a key, Table can have any value as a key. Where the order of values in an object is not static like an array (by specification, usually browsers keep the order which they are defined), the values in Table will have a static order. These advantages come with a performance cost, where an object value is a direct look-up, Table uses indexOf which is less efficient, so use with care.

Notable changes in MooTools Core include:

• Fixed Slick bug with ~div-like selectors
• Fixed MooTools in the Node.js environment
• Fixed an exception in DOMReady in Chrome when the page with MooTools was in an IFrame
• Fixed setOpacity for very small numbers in IE
• Fixed an exception in FireFox 4 when MooTools tried to overwrite document.head
• Added the possibility to create elements with boolean values with an selector, e.g. new Element('input[checked]');

MooTools More:

• Rewritten Element.Position which solved some issues
• Added Table, as described above
• Ironed out some Event Delegation issues
• Additional fixes can be found at the Lighthouse for 1.3.2.1

Get it!

• Download MooTools Core 1.3.2; Build MooTools Core 1.3.2
• Build MooTools More 1.3.2.1
• Fork / clone MooTools 1.3.2 from GitHub, and build it yourself with Packager.
• Read the Core commit logs to see precisely what has changed.
• Read the More commit logs to see precisely what has changed for More.
• Browse the Documentation for Core & More.
• Please report any bugs you can find on Lighthouse, our bug tracker.

A few months back we sent out a survey asking you where you’d like for the development team to focus its energies. Since then we’ve worked on demos and released a new version of the framework with new features based on that valuable feedback. Getting direct input from everyone who uses MooTools helps us as developers stay on target for the things you need.

One of the items that came up several times in the survey was a desire for more support for internationalization. MooTools More already ships with a system for localizing plugins, but this functionality isn’t baked deep into the framework. Several comments in the survey implied a desire to see this functionality available throughout MooTools Core. One respondent wrote, “It is difficult to understand MooTools as my English is not great. My website has many visitors from where I live and they need all to understand it. Thank you.”

You asked for a more culturally sensitive framework and we listened. Given that the MooTools development team is based all over the world from Italy to Austria to The Netherlands to Germany to Sweden we can understand the value of having MooTools available in your native tongue.

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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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