ted serbinski – a blog about drupal, macs, productivity, health, and bmws

NOTE: This project has been superceded by the most excellent jQuery Calendar. All development on this plugin will now be merged with that project.

I am pleased to announce that my jQuery date picker is now ready for consumption, check it out here:

http://tedserbinski.com/jcalendar/index.html

This plugin was originally written to improve the interface for adding activities on MothersClick.com and will be working as the new input widget for date module. Initial mom reactions have been extremely positive (from a couple beta testers) and we hope to roll this into production after we iron out the kinks with Karen to get this into date module as the new default widget.

Finally, the much anticipated SimpleMenu 3.0 is finally out!

Brand new is an entire rewrite of the jQuery menu code and CSS. The menu code is now based on Superfish which is an “an enhanced Suckerfish-style menu plugin for jQuery” written by Joel Birch. This new version most notably adds a hover delay on menu display, giving those fast-moving hands a breather this time around—that’s right, those submenus don’t disappear right away any more, much easier to use :-)

Additionally, I’ve rewritten it to remove the unnecessary AJAX callback, I’m not even sure why it was there to begin with, ah well. That drastically speeds up the menu now and reduces flicker.

As I was re-rolling my JS aggregation patch for Drupal, I stumbled upon an interesting solution to an age old problem I’ve encountered numerous times.

When I write various JavaScript files for websites, I often like to serve them out compressed—-not only to save on bandwidth but also to speed up the loading time for users. To accomplish the task of compressing JavaScript files, I usually resort to using tools like Dojo ShrinkSafe and Dean Edward’s packer (the same compression that jQuery uses as well).

So one of the problems with Drupal (and well just about any other website out there) is the fact that it is quite easy to post forms more than once. Why do you think ecommerce sites take such huge precautions for preventing multiple form submissions?

In the case of Drupal, this can be quite annoying, especially for those running sites with huge user bases, all of which have varying speeds of internet connections and all of whom like to click that "submit" button more than once.