Tuesday, April 29, 2008

jQuery UI tabs and jMap with Seagull

Today I came accross a weird problem while tried to put together a pimped-up profile page with jQuery tabs and a google map inside one of tabs.

jMap is a jQuery plugin for handling Google Maps.

UI is user interface plugin for jQuery which among others handles tabbed controlls.

Problem :
If you embed a jMap map inside a UI tab the map wont be rendered correctly (it isnt centered correctly, some sections of map wont be loaded). When you place the div containing the map out of the tab it loads just fine. Obviously jQuery magic goes wrong somewhere, as the map is functioning correctly, you have controlls and if you move it around it loads some (not all visible) sections so it must be some width/height/padding/margin but I wasnt able to debug what is going on in the background, too much things happen at once.

Solution:
It DOES matter in which order you set up jQuery objects. First you have to set up the map, then set up UI Tabs and it works like a charm.

The code should be something like this (if you wander about {} enclosed stuff which are not JSON notation, its how you can reference php variables in JS with Flexy in Seagull):

{scriptOpen:h}
$(document).ready(function(){
$('#map').jmap('init', {
mapCenter:[{aGeoCodes[longitude]},{aGeoCodes[latitude]}],
mapZoom: 15,
mapShowjMapIcon: false
});
$('#map').jmap("addMarker", {pointLatLng:[{aGeoCodes[longitude]},{aGeoCodes[latitude]}]});
$("#tabbedProfile > ul").tabs();
});
{scriptClose:h}


Hope this helps to someone suffering from same (d)effect to save a bit of debugging.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Seagull CMS first impression

Today I gave a Segaull CMS module (1.3) a try. Was interested about its features, and what benefit it has over Publisher module, which is a bit aged cms solution for SGL, and is it ready for production use without any tweaking.

CMS beats Publisher in almost every aspect (faster, smarter,more configurable), so it could be a solid solution if you dont need multilingual support (although it could be around the corner, but I dont know how far the corner is :). Publisher has multilingual support on the other hand.

CMS supports: types & attributes of content (nice feature), versioning (although I couldnt figure out how can I select the version of the published content, but maybe that is my bad). Give the wiki a try for more details.

Found a small bug in category management (images for TreeView are not referenced correctly) nothing serious, another one in navigation (add a page that is link to content, save and try to edit it, it doesnt fill the edit form correctly) more serious a bit, but there is workaround, fill everything again on edit :).

It has some really nice AJAX interface, so things are kept simple yet usable.

The next step will be to use CMS functionality to store user generated content like CV-s etc, interested in how it could be used along with other modules, but I am sure that it will perform well.

Only few things are there that are making me to stick with Publisher:
- the code comes obfuscated with community version, and sooner or later I will need some customization (though that can be done by extending cms classes),
- multilingual support (most of sites done are not english on my side), lack of it is showstopper atm
- still have some environments with php4 installed, and CMS requires 5.2, but if I make serious threats to root on host he will upgrade for sure, as all such upgrades have to be done sooner or later as php4 is not supported any more, and I am the root...

So Demian and Julien did a great job as CMS module is getting mature CMS solution. Cant wait to see how it develops further.