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.
MilkChart is an outstanding set of MooTools classes that create robust charts from your static data. Chart types include column, bar, line, scatter, and pie. MilkChart uses the HTML5 <canvas> tag and is only supported on browsers other than IE.
http://code.google.com/p/milkchart/
MooTools Core Developer Christoph Pojer (cpojer) released Tree Component, an advanced tree structure plugin which allows for drag and drop organization, cookie tree saving, and collapsible branches.
http://cpojer.net/blog/MooTools_Tree_Components
Authored by Justin Donato, MTMultiSelect is a great plugin that allows you to select multiple items from a paginated list. You may also search the list of items to quickly identify the items you'd like to select.
http://www.justindonato.com/demo/mtmultiselect/
MultipleLinks is a MooTools class created by Merrick Christensen. MultipleLinks is a tooltip-like plugin that provides the user a list of possible destinations to click to. MutipleLinks is also highly skinnable.
http://thejavascriptblog.com/mootools-multiple-links-class/
MooTools Core Developer Scott Kyle (appden) created Request.Twitter, a very small MooTools class to retrieve tweets from Twitter. The class is flexible in that you may define the URL to query so you may retrieve user statuses, search terms, etc. Request.Twitter is an extension of the Request.JSONP class in MooTools More, showing the power MooTools' valuable inheritance system.
http://appden.com/javascript/get-tweets-with-mootools/
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!
There’s always a lot going on behind the scenes with the MooTools javascript framework. And how could there not be? Here’s a look at what’s coming in the next few months.
As we turn our attentions towards MooTools 2.0, version 1.2 will not receive any significant upgrades. However, until MooTools 2.0 is released we will continue to support the current version with bug fixes. To that end we’re releasing MooTools Core 1.2.4 which fixes several small bugs and addresses a change coming in the next release of Firefox. Because of this inconvenient Firefox change, we’ll also be releasing MooTools Core 1.1.2, an update to the 1.1.1 release. Sites using 1.1.1 will be able to drop in 1.1.2 without it affecting anything. We’ll post more details on this when we release these two updates.
While the 1.2 version of MooTools Core no longer accepts additions, MooTools More, the official plugins collection, continues to be iterated upon constantly. Included in the next version of MooTools More (1.2.4.1) are numerous bug fixes and performance enhancements, along with new widgets, classes, and extensions for you to play with. Here are a few:
Another plugin coming in MooTools More 1.2.4.1 is a client side dependency manager. This class allows you to lazy-load files from the MooTools libraries and any other libraries that use similar organization (i.e. those that map their dependencies with the same mechanisms).
In addition to this client side implementation of the dependency loader is a server side version that greatly improves performance. The server side implementation concatenates and (optionally) compresses the files together so that there’s only one request and is far more efficient.
MooTools ART has been under development off and on for nearly a year now and for the most part has been under wraps. MooTools ART is the foundation for MooTools’ upcoming UI library. Using canvas and VML, it features support for dynamic illustrations, allowing complex UI elements that have numerous interactive states. When released, will come with numerous plugins for stylable windows, buttons, and more.
One of the most interesting ART features is its support for themes using CSS-like syntax in javascript. In conjunction with the default widgets that come with ART we hope to see the MooTools community create numerous interfaces using the system that allows for a fully themable UI by the end of the year.
Anyone who has been around the MooTools forums or IRC channel has heard that the user plugin catalog (which we call the Forge) is always “coming soon”. Well, this time, we mean it. The MooTools Forge is a new application which will act as a central repository for MooTools plugins created by, well, by you. The Forge will pull your code directly from GitHub, taking into account versioning and dependencies, and providing plugin usage details.
The Forge is currently in the last stages of testing. Look forward to seeing the MooTools forge by the end of October at the latest.
MooShell is an outstanding interactive shell editor for debugging your MooTools code created by Piotr Zalewa. Instead of pasting your CSS, javascript, and HTML into static PasteBins, you may use MooShell to show others the issues you are experiencing with your code. You may also quickly experiment with different techniques and share your ideas with others.
Your favorite javascript framework is about to become 1.612903225806452 times as awesome. MooTools 2.0 will feature an optimized Fx library, an improved Class class (one of the foundations of the entire framework) and inheritance model, blazing fast selector engine (Slick), numerous speed optimizations, and many more goodies. Look forward to a more detailed post soon!