I realized this morning that Anonymous Coward’s Facebook Phonebook Greasemonkey script broke awhile back so I decided to rewrite it from scratch.
The original instructions for how to install the script are available here.
I updated the original Userscripts page with the new script so you can download it here.
Earlier today, I was trying to use jQuery to trigger the submission of a form after a radio button was clicked. The form tag looked something like:
So for a regular submit button:
Everything works fine, you’ll see the alert() and the form won’t submit because of the return false.
I ran into issues when I tried to trigger() the submit event with jQuery. I was trying to trigger the submit() event on the form via jQuery. The problem I ran into, was that the saysomething() function was getting called, but the “return false” seemed to have no effect.
The final form looked something like:
For some reason, if you submit the form via a jQuery trigger the form submits even though saysomething() gets called. I’m not sure if this is the expected behavior but it was certainly something of a shock. Anyway, a live version of the form is running here.
We’ve been using Jeff Hui’s very awesome jquery.blank plugin for sometime over at Setfive HQ. What blank() is allow you to basically move the labels for text inputs into the input themselves (to save space). We use this technique frequently for login boxes in headers since it’s easier not to have to stick in labels next to text boxes.
The problem is, you can’t use blank() on a password field since a password field won’t display clear text (obviously). To get around this, I’ve always manually stuck in a “shadow” text box next to the password field and toggled the text box or password box in order to make blank() work correctly.
Anyway, I finally got tired of doing this so I decided to patch the plugin to do this automatically. Jeff incorporated the code back into blank() and it’s available on GitHub here.
Happy coding.
Every now and then, we use Sphinx to provide full text searching in MySQL InnoDB tables. Sphinx is pretty solid. It’s easy to set up, pretty fast, and easy to deploy.
My one big issue with Sphinx has always been making it play nice with Symfony, specifically Propel. The way Sphinx returns a result set is as an ordered list of [id, weight] for each document it matched. As outlined here the idea is to then hit your MySQL server to return the actual documents and use “ORDER BY FIELD(id, [id list])” to keep them in the right order that you received the list.
The problem is, Propel Criteria objects provide no mechanism to set an ORDER BY FIELD. This is an issue because if you drop Criterias you loose Propel Pagers which generally adds to a lot of duplicated code and is honestly just not very elegant.
Anyway, after some thought I came up with this solution.
If you read through the definition of “Criteria::addDescendingOrderByColumn()”:
All it really does is add the second part of the ORDER BY clause to an array which then gets joined up to build the final SQL. Because of this, you can actually just add an element onto the orderByColumns array which will cause Propel to execute an ORDER BY FIELD SQL statement.
To make the magic happen, I sub-classed Criteria and then added a addOrderByField() function to let me add a field to order by as well as a list to order by.
Also add this function to make sure your ORDER BY FIELD columns get cleared:
To use it, do something like this:
And thats about it. Since sfCriteria is a sub-class of Criteria the code works seamlessly with existing PropelPagers and anything else that expects a Propel Criteria.
I was slaving over a hot keyboard all Friday!
But at last it is done – FBConnect for sfGuard.
Get it here http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfFbConnectGuardPlugin
A detailed explanation of how to install it and use it is on the Symfony site.
Anyway, the plugin basically just introduces a new table to keep track of Facebook IDs <---> sfGuardUserIds
Here’s a fun nugget. One of the problems with using FB Connect is that you can’t mug a user’s email address from Facebook. Obviously this is a smart move on Facebook’s part but it makes life hard for my Nigerian spammer friends. If you want to snag a user’s email address (or anything else for that matter) while still using Facebook Connect here’s a sketch of how to do it.
Everything is the same except you can’t use Facebook’s FBML to render the FB Connect button. What you want to do instead is trigger the “connect” event by hand. Here is basically how we do it:
Bam. Got the user’s email address and logged them in via FB Connect.