XenForo & jQuery TOOLS?

[XẹnPixel]

Tero has been very busy with his FlowPlayer & other projects and the promised 2.0 version was never released.

What does the stagnant version of jQuery TOOLS means to XenForo? Will XF shift to another library or something?

 

[Chris D]

When appropriate and the necessary amount of work can take place, I'm sure they will implement a newer release of jQuery.

 

[XẹnPixel]

The upcoming 1.2.8 version for jQuery 1.9 compatibility is done only by 1 person, though there are other users reporting bugs. Maybe Kier can also help alibby251 with bug fixing

Btw, I hope JQT will still be XF JS library. I really don't like its alternatives such as the jQuery UI.

 

[cornishman]

I really don't like its alternatives such as the jQuery UI.

Do you mind if I ask what you find wrong with it (jQueryUI) ?
I have been following many arguments for and against, but nothing tangible enough to satisfy my curiosity.

 

[XẹnPixel]

^ I'm only doing HTML and CSS (and a very few jQuery) so my opinion is basically on my personal usage. I don't know which of those have better code or which one performs better.

No.1 reason why I don't like jQuery UI is that it adds/manipulate DOM elements and classes on load. For example, when I want to have Overlay/Modal, it adds elements for close button with lots of classes. It even adds useless DIV elements. Whereas with jQuery Tools, you will manually write the HTML elements that you want to become the Overlay - no useless markups that gets generated.

No. 2 is styling. I want complete control of CSS. In jQuery UI even if you don't use a theme, it seems that you are forced to use its generated classes - well, why use another class name if there's one already?

Also, jQuery Tools is a smaller in size.

In summary, I want total control of my mark-up and CSS

 

[cclaerhout]

jQuery UI size is really too big. When I see how developers use it with Wordpress, it's crazy. Sometimes they could use some basic jQuery code, but no... they use jQuery UI instead which makes the pages load very slowly.

For the record the jQuery website is here: http://jquerytools.org/
And here is where most of improvements/fixes can be found now: https://github.com/jquerytools/jquerytools/issues

As you can see in the last link, as ForoStyle said, there are serious compatibly problems with the last version of jQuery and jQuery Tools. Knowing that XenForo is using a lot the jQuery tools, it will prevent it to update to the last version of jQuery. Which means the first question of ForoStyle is a really good one.

 

[XẹnPixel]

I think XF only uses the Overlay, Tooltips, Tabs and Toolbox(Expose) . If this was done via jQuery UI, I think its size will doubled.

 

[cclaerhout]

And the validator too I think. Which is already quite a lot. And to be honest, without these nice overlays, XenForo won't be XenForo

 

[EQnoble]

I have both running together on a testbed with a no conflict workaround

In my opinion to put it simply, when Tools fails...your page not relying on it can still be viewed...when you break something that relies on UI, you tend to have more of a mess.

 

[Hoffi]

Don't load the complete package of jQuery UI. Load only the libraries you really use. After first load, the browser fetches it from the local Cache, and the UI is fast.

 

[Adam Howard]

When you download jQuery UI, yes the file size is a little larger. But that is because it's not optimized (minified) from their site.... Once you optimize it, its actually smaller. This being that you only use the needed libraries .... There is no need to download or use them all.

 

[digitalpoint]

Total side note, but hopefully it will help someone that runs across the same issue. I have one function that needs the draggable() method of jQuery UI (I'd be happy to do it with jQuery Tools, but they don't have functions for dragging)... Specifically my drag and drop thread movement system for mods/admins.

Long story short is I updated my end from jQuery UI 1.8, and something changed in jQuery UI 1.9.0 (and higher) that breaks jQuery Tool's tooltips (just by loading the jQuery UI script... not even doing anything with it). It turns out they have some functions in the same namespace as jQuery Tools.

So if you *do* need a load jQuery UI, you need to load it before xenforo.js (which is where jQuery Tools resides) so methods like tooltip functionality don't get overwritten by jQuery UI.