Sperrobjekt Weblog

I've fallen deeply in love with JavaScript libraries like jQuery in the past months. There's so much cool stuff you can do by simply including one ore more .js files to your web site. Be it form validation, GUI-like elements, or just toggling the visibility of block elements. Image overlay effects like Lightbox or Thickbox are based on these libraries, too.

So I decided it was about time we had those libs in Serendipity. We need them to create a more intuitive user experience both in the frontend and the backend. Especially in the backend, where other blog tools like Movable Type 4 look much slicker to me. Anyway, I sat down and hacked together a new plugin for S9y that lets you include jQuery and some of its plugins, mootools (including many extensions in one file), and Prototype in your web site. You can choose between frontend and backend display and select single plugins for jQuery (my favorite lib right now). I would really appreciate it if some S9y users/developers would download and install the plugin and give me feedback on it (forum seems to be down, but there's already a thread on this).

To give you an idea of what could be done with it, I edited the default admin templates, got rid of all the tables and exchanged them for divs. Then I added some tabs to the "edit entry" area with the help of the tabs plugin for jQuery. You can see the result if you open the s9y_tabs.ogg of the desktop session I recorded with Istanbul (in Ogg Theora format, no sound).