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jQuery 1.4
jQuery1.4 has now been released. I just recently started using jQuery and have used it for a few projects. Now I am not sure how much testing I need to do before I upgrade my code or if I should even bother. I think for the time being I will keep my old projects at their current level and upgrade as I build new apps.
DrPic.com
I was helping my kids’ principal with the school newsletter and she was having an issue with a Word document that was too big (8MB). She was on her school computer with no way to resize the 3 huge images she was trying to insert. I was thinking about our options when she said, “What about picture doctor dot com?” I had never heard of such a thing, but after a little searching, I found it.
DrPic.com is certainly not going to replace PhotoShop anytime soon, but it worked great for her. I don’t know that I will ever use it, but it is nice to know it exists.
jQuery in a CMS
I have used jQuery twice in the past month to get some custom behavior from a CMS. In the first instance I used it to re-URL a site for Xavier, and in the second instance I used it for some custom menu options that weren’t available in WordPress. I like the results it produces, but I always worry a little bit about JavaScript as a solution. I would much rather keep things server-side, but sometimes client-side is just easier (and almost as reliable).
WP Events Calendar and Internet Explorer 7
UPDATE: I usually don’t like doing updates like this, but I want to keep this together. First of all, I realized this morning that I was using IE7, not IE8. I upgraded, and things worked better, but it threw a javascript error after it loaded the first event, so not much better. I decided to downgrade events calendar (by renaming the folder and uploading the code from the previous stable version) and it looks like everything is working now. Yea!
UPDATE: This fixed the error, but it also broke the tooltip, which is fairly important to the plugin functionality, so I undid my changes and am going to see if there is another way to fix this. What I haven’t figured out yet is why .tooltip does not cause a problem on the calendar in the actual site, but only in the administrator.
It looks like there is also some sort of issue with the jquery datepicker plugin. If I had to guess I would bet that it is the same issue.
One of the sites I help maintain was trying to use the WP Events Calendar plugin, and when we set it up everything worked great, but when our users went to use it IE8 kept denying them access to the page.
I looked at a lot of code and narrowed it down to the jquery tooltip plugin. Eventually I found the solution – change the createHelper function in the jquery tooltip code from .appendTo('document.body'); to .appendTo('document.anotherPageElement');. In my case I switched out ‘body’ for ‘wpcontent’. If you need to edit this for your WordPress installation the pathing should be something like /wp-content/plugins/events-calendar/js/jquery.tooltip.min.js. I actually pulled in the full code so I could understand it better. I can’t imagine that will affect performance too much.
Now I am getting the same error on the page where I edit the events, but I think this is a good start.
Google Wave Notifier
IMO, if you are using Google Wave, you need the Google Wave Notifier plugin for firefox.
One thing I don’t like about Google Wave is that it does not integrate with gmail. Since not many people are on yet, I don’t like to check it all the time because I don’t get a lot of activity. Google Wave Notifier puts a little notifier in your browser status bar, alerting you to a new wave. I dig it.
CKEditor
I just had my first experience with installing and configuring CKEditor, formerly FCKEditor. I have used it many times, but this was the first time that I added to a site that I am working on. It was really easy to add and to customize.
I did have to do a little digging around at first, because I didn’t realize that they had changed the name. I liked the old name.
Flex vs Flash
Yesterday I attended a free Flex training session that was put on by Adobe. The training covered how to integrate Flex with ColdFusion. I know a fair amount about ColdFusion, but hardly anything about Flex. I learned a lot, but I have a lot more to learn about Flex.
One issue I pondered during the training was the difference between Flash and Flex. I think the difference comes from how the apps are built. Yesterday we worked on our projects using Flex Builder and the interface was one that I am very comfortable with. I opened Adobe Flash CS3 today and it looked a lot more like PhotoShop, and less like something I would use comfortably. In the end they both produce apps that run on the Flash platform, and I think they can fun on the AIR platform as well.
I did some looking around and found this article about the differences: The Difference Between Flex and Flash.
Google Chrome CPU Issues
Chrome was making my CPU go nuts and my whole machine was slowing down. I am not sure if it was Chrome or Wave, so I restarted Chrome and closed my Wave tab. We’ll see what happens.
WordPress Menubar Plugin
I recently used the WordPress Menubar Plugin on a couple of sites I put together, and I love it. It is so easy to use and it works really well. I like the various options it provides me – from different menu styles to how the menus are actually built out.
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