The image button on the tinymce instance of silverstripe html text fields is really nice and well layed out : it gives editors one of the best text / image integration, with a minimum user actions that’s both powerful, intuitive, and reactive thanks to AJAX calls to the folder structure.

One small drawback is that it comes with one small feature that can be annoying at times, especially when you’re looking for inserting images without resampling them, especially for transparent images or tight image integration / quality that Silverstripe resampling functions (PHP based) cannot match (check out the original image hack).

Image size limit feature

In silverstripe, when you select a big image, width and height are automatically resized to a maximum of 600 pixels. Quick hackers might want to deactivate this feature by commenting the resize algorithm in cms/code/ThumbnailStripField.php (lines 73/80 of 2.3 rc2).

But for those who want the best of both worlds (enjoy limitation AND allow original size), here is a hack that will allow editors to choose between the limited image size (max 600, very useful for huge uploads straight from high definition camera) and the original size (very useful for reasonable image size, like example here of 800). Next trick would be to allow editor to type in width and height with automatic calculation of the image proportion. We’re getting closer to photoshop indeed.

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Ever experienced trouble uploading files to wordpress (popular opensource blog platform), silverstripe (popular my favourite opensource CMS), or any application using swf upload ? Weeks after the bug has been identified, I have to admit I am wondering about the reactivity of SWFupload team : the version that fixes the bug was out a few days later but is currently still beta. And this is not some minor bug, all platforms that upgraded to flash 10 lost their ability to upload files ! Anyway, no doubt swfupload  version 2.2 final will be out before the end of the year, in the meanwhile you can try NAS UPLOADER, nice alternative that does the job too. Big plus, comes with a nice layout. Big minus, you can’t stop uploading after you’ve started and finally decided your file is too big to go through your small ADSL upload capacity…

If you’ve tried the impromptu jquery plugin, you’re probably left with some frustrating feeling, finding that  such an easy solution for javascript alert, confirm and prompt replacement, could be enhanced by a nicer graphic design. Replacing the “X’” letter by a now standard close button, just like can be found on facebox, could do the job. But then why not benefit default facebook style layout and use the whole facebox plugin, or go for another stylish modal jquery plugin, such as jModal… A few lines of javascript code will easily replace the prompt function, just like the lines of code from the example below.
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Who has code completion, CSS classes browser, Javascript function browser, PHP code browser, HTML elements browser, all together in a single interface that covers this multiple array of features in a perfectly usable environment  ?  As far as I’m concerned, the battle between Aptana and Dreamweaver is over : the eclipse extension known as Aptana Studio Community Edition performs incredibly well for me after a few months of learning which plugins are best and where different perspectives stand. The fact that Ajax development is covered does a lot : check out Spket extension, I have tested it in Aptana and it does a great job completing code with available  variables and methods from EXTJS . To be faire, Spket is available for Dreamweaver too.

remember our quest for the ideal select box plugin ? seems that Jquery can be proud to deliver one of the best select dropwon box on the opensource market. Select Box Factory covers an impressive list of options : fully skinnable, options images, list filter, first letter selection… Good work.

Javascript libraries

While EXTJS 3.0 is on the way with a roadmap setting deadlines for early 2009, Jquery continues its path on the way to serious lightweight alternative to the massive EXT : JX extension for Jquery includes the viewport paradigm on which relies every EXT JS application.

Web based interfaces

In spite of huge progress and impressive use of ease, Jquery is not there yet : for the development of applications many developers have chosen the exhaustivity of EXT JS. Have a look at google code hosted project in development : ecartcommerce, CMS jimw, both ext js and zend framework based. In the world of content management systems, mysource is making the news with a new video that demonstrates inline editing, and other exciting Rich Application features.

• Ext examples
• Enhanced Accordion extension
• ExtJs Livegrid extension
• Saki’s extjs page (examples and extensions)
• File explorer view (grid extension)
• file explorer with  PHP code
• swfupload extension
• Last but not least, the ux repository

What’s nice about internet technologies is that they always get better. But this can also be a problem, and Flash 10 complies to this rule with a new security feature that impacts all CMSes with advanced file upload ability, specifically those using the swfupload component : wordpress and silverstripe customers have reported inability to upload files after upgrading flash from 9 to 10 ! Thank god the bug is fixed with the new version of swfupload : go ahead and start copy and paste operations on your websites.

Ext Js grid component has more than just inline editing, sorting, paging : a little javascript knowledge can get you far. An example of a nice implementation is server sid grid filtering and quickserach provided as sample featured on EXTjs website. I particularly like the quicksearch that displays a drop box of fields available for search.

After a few hours looking for a good implementation of recursive data with Zend Framework, I came across Hector Virgen’s table abstraction for nested recursive tables, which uses the efficiency of the Modified Preorder Tree Traversal method that retrieves descendents and ancestors faster that with the old parent_id reference. In fact parent_id is not needed any more but in the example below we will keep the parent_id implementation. My aim here is to implement a draggable tree with data from this Zend_DB_Table abstraction. Setting up ext js with Zend Framework is not that hard, especially when many tutorials have been posted around for extjs tree with other frameworks such as Cake PHP .
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