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.
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.
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.
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.
Sean McArthur has recently updated his popular Tabs class by making it more efficient and more flexible.
This Plugin by Lim Chee Aun (@cheeaun) allows a different transition for every property that is being animated.
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!
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.
The MooTools Dependency Checker by Arian Stolwijk parses you javascript files to determine which MooTools classes you need to make the file's javascript code work. Arian's dependency checker is a great tool for those looking to implement a MooTools plugin or use minified code.
http://www.aryweb.nl/projects/mooDeps/
InputMask is a useful MooTools plugin by Core Developer Christoph Pojer. InputMask allows you to set a template or "mask" for which a string should be formatted like. This plugin is great for date, time, or phone number formatting.
http://cpojer.net/blog/InputMask_Class_for_MooTools
DatePicker is a great plugin by MonkeyPhysics. DatePicker allows you to provide your users with a calendar to choose dates from instead of making users type in the date. DatePicker is very customizable and allows for easy styling/theming.
http://www.monkeyphysics.com/mootools/script/2/datepicker
MooModernizr tests the browser's CSS capabilities -- specifically CSS3 feature detection. MooModernizr extends MooTools' Browser.Features object. MooModernizr is a port of the original Modernizr.
http://www.aryweb.nl/voorbeelden/mooModernizr/
MooTools Core Developer Christoph Pojer shares methods for speeding up your applications through the use of optimized CSS selectors. Consider this article a must-read if you use Selectors frequently in your large web applications.
http://cpojer.net/blog/Speed_Up_Your_Moo_Part_1_Selectors
JSCocoaLoader allows you to develop Espresso.app code editor extensions using MooTools and JSCocoa. JSCocoaLoader’s utility classes are all powered by Mootools, and as a happy side effect your Javascripts can easily take advantage of Mootools many improvements over vanilla Javascript either by requiring a JSCocoaLoader utility class, or by requiring Mootools directly.
http://wiki.github.com/onecrayon/JSCocoaLoader-sugar/mootools-server
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 future plugins in upcoming posts!