In the Wild for June 20

By Eric MiragliaJune 20th, 2008

It’s a toasty 105 degrees this evening in California — what better way to cool off (and celebrate the solstice) than to dive into the wild with some of the many YUI items that have caught our eye since the last post?

• Nicora.net’s YUI PhotoViewer: Can you ever have too many lightbox options? Check out nicora.net’s YUI-based PhotoViewer Control, with a variety of flavors and built-in support for Flickr APIs.
• Instant Shiny Forms with Rails and YUI: That’s the title of Enleitened’s new tutorial that "demonstrate[s] how to convert standalone Ruby on Rails forms to a YUI Dialog (hey, it’s one less page load) in only 4 easy steps."
• Javascript Framework Usage Among the Top 100 Websites: Royal Pingdom started some interesting discussions a few weeks back with its article exploring which JS frameworks were in use at the top 100 websites (based on Alexa and Webware data). They found Prototype, JQuery and YUI leading the way among these top sites (excluding most of Yahoo!’s own mainstream properties, which all rely on YUI to some degree). The authors were quick to point out that theirs was not a scientific survey, but they noted their surprise at what the research turned up — and what it failed to turn up. (Note: YUI’s popular CSS components were discluded from this survey; Mint, which also uses YUI extensively, was acknowledged for its use of MooTools.)
• Exploring YUI Custom Events: Speaking of Mint, Matt Snider is back with another YUI tutorial, this one using YUI Custom Events to create an "Object Subscription Pattern."
• Using YUI CSS with Django: Over on Sofeng’s Blog, Sofeng noticed that The Django Book uses YUI CSS; he worked up a tutorial to show you how to do the same in your own Django project.
• Learning YUI: Nathan Smith recently started work at one of my favorite alt-search-engines, Viewzi, which uses YUI. He picked up Dan Wellman’s book to learn the ropes, and then he posted a nice review of some of what he’s discovered as a new YUI user.
• Adam Moore + Douglas Crockford = Epiphany: Lenny Burdette writes on his Rule52 blog about "How YUI’s event listeners changed the way I write JavaScript", bringing together insights from the sample chapter of Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts and the expressive power of Adam Moore’s YUI Event Utility.
• Richard Benson’s YUI Rich Text Editor Plugin for Movable Type: In Richard’s words: "YUI has become my new favourite Rich Text Editor and I have been implementing it left right and centre. Its extensibility, features and ease of use are unparalleled. It made sense for all these features to be available to me in Movable Type so why not package it up into a plugin too? … Options include stretching the editor to fit the content automatically and disbaling use of the MT assets selection tools in favour of a simpler URL-based image chooser." Check out the plugin in the Movable Type Plugin Directory.
• Adding Tabs to Your WordPress Blog: Adrian Diaconescu at Rubiqube went looking for a good tabbed-content solution for his WordPress sidebar, but he couldn’t find something that fully scratched the itch. His response was to deploy the YUI TabView Control, and he’s written up a detailed tutorial so you can leverage his work.
• YUI DataTable in Grails: Marcel Overdijk recently whipped up a nice example integrating YUI DataTable in Grails.

Did we miss something good? Probably so…if so, let us know in the comments.