We use a lot of open source software here at aPeel. Really, a lot. One of the greatest beneits to using open source software is that if it's not doing exactly what you need it to do, you can modify it to suit your needs. We've run into a few such situations recenty and are doing our part to contribute back our changes. Another great thing about open source is that if the author of a particular piece of software can no longer maintain the code base, other people are free to pick it up and continue from where the original author left off.
So, I'd like to take this opportunity to announce a few new repositories at GitHub. For anyone who doesn't already know, GitHub is a great source control management web service, and they generously donate free resources to any open source project that is hosted with them. So here are a few that we've started recently.
accordion is a nice piece of javascript to display animated accordions on webpages. Originially written and released by StickMan Labs, via this blog post. I started a repo to track the script and then merged in some changes that had been suggested in the comments to the original post to get the script up to date with Prototoype 1.6 and Scriptaculous 1.8.
FancyForm is a script written and released by Vacuous Virtuoso that replaces traditional checkboxes and radio buttons with nice image based variations. This allows the designer to control the look and feel of these controls. This repo was started mainly as a way to easily track updates and changes for...
FancyFormPrototype is just a port of the orignial FancyForm script to run in a Prototype based environment instead of a MooTools environment. FancyForm was the best script I could find for making a nice looking form. Unfortunately the project I was working on already used Prototype, and since Prototype and MooTools don't alway play nicely together, FancyFormPrototype was born.
railsdav is a plugin for Ruby on Rails written by Stuart Eccles. It allows a rails application to expose a part of a file system for use as a webDAV volume. It will also allow you to interface portions of an ActiveRecord model with DAV allowing you to create a way for people to drag and drop images onto your server, and have those images create new records in your database (just as an example). It looks like there are a few other forks of this on GitHub. I should probably try to integrate all of the other changes into a single code base soon....
Anyway, that's a little bit of what we've been up to around here lately. Just remember: "Use the source, Luke."
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By : Jeremy Green