Category: jQuery

Skinning your jQuery UI Components quick and easily – ThemeRoller

By Matt Daum | Leave a Comment on Skinning your jQuery UI Components quick and easily – ThemeRoller

We use jQuery on almost every project we do. As many know updating your theme for your website widgets can take a long time. Recently we found the jQuery UI – ThemeRoller. This allows you to quickly skin all of your jQuery UI widgets within a matter of couple of mouse clicks.  For those of us who can’t pick matching colors for their life, ThemeRoller has many template themes. ThemeRoller allows you to start with a templated theme, and to easily modify it via the GUI.

This will save you time and money as hand editing the CSS files to update your jQuery UI widgets is slow and tedicious.

sfWidgetjQueryTimepickr – Symfony timepickr widget

By Ashish Datta

A couple of months ago John Resig posted on his blog about a “new” way for users to pick time.

The component is a jQuery plugin called timepickr and I thought it was particularly neat. Anyway, I finally needed to write a form which had a time component so I figured I’d drop in the timepickr jQuery plugin.

It didn’t look like there was a Symfony Forms widget for it so I whipped one up. You can grab it here.

The only issue with timepickr is that it introduces a ton of dependencies. It requires jQuery, jQuery-ui, jQuery.utils, jQuery.string, and ui.dropslide. Additionally, it needs the dropslide css as well as the timepickr css.

The form widget assumes that you will include jquery-ui by yourself since everyone usually has different naming conventions. It will include the other JS files and CSS files for you.

You can download a package with all of the JS and CSS you need here. Again this DOES NOT include the jQuery-ui stuff. YOU have to include that yourself in your Symfony project as well as on the page that you deploy this widget.

To use it, just drop it in your Symfony project somewhere where classes get autoloaded (projectdir/lib works) and then instantiate a widget with new sfWidgetjQueryTimepickr() . It currently will support all of the timepickr options passed in as widget options (on the constructor). Full documentation for timepickr is here.

Have fun picking time.

Client side RSS aggregator

By Ashish Datta

One of our clients came to us a few days ago asking us if we could build something to aggregate several RSS feeds and then display it on their site.

Easy enough. Except the caveats were 1) This had to be done on a shoe string budget and 2) We had no permission to script on the server side (only client side scripting allowed kids).

We put our heads together and realized that Yahoo Pipes would provide the functionality to easily combine several RSS feeds, sort them, filter them, ect. And best part? It’s all built and all free. Pipes also provides the functionality to export a pipe as a JSON feed (as opposed to RSS).

So that takes care of problem 1 and almost fixes problem 2. Of course the remaining problem is getting around the cross domain XHR restrictions on the JSON. I did some poking around the Yahoo Pipes documentation and it turns out you can add a _callback parameter to the URL and bang it wraps the JSON in a JS callback!

Issues solved. The final part was to mix in a little jQuery to load the JSON+callback feed into a <script> tag and then display it.

Total lines of code: 27 lines of javascript.

EDIT. Now with code!

Client-side validation for the new Symfony forms with jQuery

By Hamid Palo | 3 Comments on Client-side validation for the new Symfony forms with jQuery

The new Symfony forms are great improvement over the old forms and once you get over the learning curve you can’t imagine life without them. The only problem with them is that they don’t really offer client-side validation (yes, being agnostic when it comes to Javascript libraries is maybe good but come on). There is fortunately a plugin that does client-side validation but it is Prototype-based, and looks a bit clunky.

For those of us using jQuery there was nothing, so we decided to write our own small helper that integrates this jQuery validator with the new forms. It’s nothing fancy, but it does the trick for now, and we may expand it into a full-fledged plugin that does all sorts of crazy things.

Using the helper:

  1. Download and install the jQuery validation plugin.
  2. Download the helper and put it in lib/helper/jQueryValHelper.php
  3. Include the jQueryVal helper.
  4. To enable the helper for a specific form:
    <?php echo jquery_val_form_tag($form, array(‘action’ => url_for(“@register“) ))?>

That’s it.

The validator currently supports email, min and max length validation. The only required option is action, the other options you can pass it are:

  1. error_placement: Change where the errors are rendered, for example:
    'error_placement' => 'error.prependTo(element.parent().next())'
  2. error_element: Change the element used to render the errors, default is label.

All other options you pass are added to the form as attributes.