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!
Users wishing to upgrade any large site from MooTools 1.1 to 1.2 can sometimes find it difficult. The API for 1.2 changed quite a bit, so without help upgrading your code can be fraught with danger.
Our solution is an upgrade helper that will allow you to replace your old MooTools 1.1 code with 1.2 code by logging deprecated methods to the console and telling you what needs to be changed.
The upgrade helper also attempts to automatically convert 1.1 calls to 1.2 calls. However, this helper is not really meant to be a compatibility script so much as a script designed to help you migrate your code. In almost all cases methods that have been deprecated or have had their API altered will provide feedback to the console when they are called. Ideally, developers will put this script into their environment with MooTools 1.2, use their application and change all the calls that throw warnings, then remove the upgrade helper from their environment.
You can download the upgrade helper on the MooTools Download Page along with current build of MooTools built for it. This companion library has all the functionality found in MooTools 1.1 (Drag, Accordion, etc. - some of these plugins moved out of MooTools Core and into MooTools More in 1.2).
Simply replace MooTools 1.1 with MooTools 1.2, include the upgrade helper, then include your site's code. Browse your site with a browser that provides a console API (we recommend Firefox with Firebug) and take note of the warnings thrown (note, you can adjust the logging; see the readme). Address these in your code base until you cannot find any more, then remove the upgrade helper. You have now an upgraded website, and you can use the plugins in the Forge!
If you still have warnings after you have finished converting your code, have a look at the documentation for 1.1 and 1.2 and also the source code in the upgrade helper. Most changes are simple, but may require a change of arguments. There are a few breaking changes but in the vast majority of cases these should not affect you. A complete list of the changes between 1.1 and 1.2 can be found in the readme of the github upgrade-helper repository.
The upgrade helper is being released as a beta for now. We've written and run tests against the browsers we support but the real world usage of MooTools will be the real test. As such, we hope that you, the MooTools community, will help us polish this script, by letting us know what features on your sites don't work. Bugs can be filed using the github issues for the repository.
Arguably, this is something we should have provided long ago. Going forward, we've pledged to make all releases 100% backwards compatible for all documented methods and features.
Should you require any guidance or assistance, you can, as always, find us in the #mootools IRC channel or post in the MooTools Google Group.
Last of all, massive thanks to Nathan White and David Isaacson, for their early work on this. In the last few weeks the MooTools Dev team has spent a lot of time making and testing this upgrade helper, but these guys kicked this off with their contributions and they are most appreciated.