Friday, June 24

Geek

Let's Go Dojo

I'm going to be switching Minx to the Dojo toolkit.  At present we're using Innova Editor, a tiny bit of Mootools, and some custom stuff I cooked up long ago.  I also have licenses for some Flash charting, mapping, and media player modules, but I haven't really deployed them yet.

I'm going with Dojo because it's a single, consistent library that's available under a sensible, no-strings license (BSD or AFL) and provides:
  • All the usual basic stuff to make JavaScript and AJAX nicer.
  • A solid set of form and layout widgets.
  • A WYSIWYG editor with blockquote - the only one I've ever seen.  (I have no idea why no-one implements this.)
  • A flexible grid component, ideal for managing posts and comments.
  • A capable charting component.
  • A lightbox / image gallery component.
  • A syntax highlighter.
  • A Flash/HTML5 flexible file uploader.
Plus a whole bunch of other goodies, all extensively documented, and it's relatively small, quite fast, is under very active development, and...  It works.

I don't think it's best-of-class in all the areas it covers.  But what it means is that I can say "The JavaScript toolkit for Minx is Dojo." and that pretty much covers it.*

I will be retaining Innova Editor as an option, but the Dojo editor will be the default for comments and for new blogs.

* As opposed to "MooTools, plus this list of plugins, plus Highcharts, plus Innova Editor, plus..."

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:40 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 For those of us already in the system, what will we have to do? for instance, does this affect the CSS and other layout files?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, June 24 2011 03:50 PM (+rSRq)

2 For existing users, you shouldn't see any difference (apart from maybe the comment editor).

There will be new template and BBCode tags, and there will be an option to switch to a fancier version of the control panel.  (Which will become the default once it's tested and accepted.)

To enable the new features, you'll just need to add one line of code to your header template.  I was able to load up the new toolkit on my blog without changing anything, which left me feeling very positive about the possibilities. smile

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 24 2011 04:00 PM (PiXy!)

3 I always upload HTML (since there's no API, I bring up the little pop-up and paste). Just wondering if many people do that.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, June 25 2011 01:07 AM (9KseV)

4

To enable the new features, you'll just need to add one line of code to your header template.

When the time comes, I assume you'll tell us how to do it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, June 25 2011 01:30 AM (+rSRq)

5 Yeps.

I'll provide a button (like the 1.0->1.1 upgrade button) to do the change, but doing it manually will be easy enough for anyone even slightly technical.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 25 2011 03:31 PM (PiXy!)

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