For instance, recently I’ve been working on building an application that will need an easy to use sortable list, that will fire off an event upon the list order changing. As simple as this sounds, it would require a lot of coding and cross browser testing to pull this one off with just javascript alone.

YUI 3 allowed me to accomplish the above in just a few minutes. I’m not even going to try to guess just how much time it’d of taken me to do on my own.

I made use of the Sortable Utility to make and unordered list sortable in just a few lines of code.

First I just added the YUI seed file to my page:

<script src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/3.1.1/build/yui/yui-min.js" type="text/javascript"><!--mce:0--></script>

Then just added a simple div and unordered list to my page:

<div id="want-list">
<h2>Things I want</h2>
<ul>
	<li>puppy dog</li>
	<li>ice cream</li>
	<li>G.I. Joe USS Flagg Aircraft Carrier</li>
	<li>Lego bricks</li>
	<li>iPad</li>
	<li>Infinity Gauntlet</li>
	<li>world peace</li>
	<li>Star Scream</li>
	<li>waffles</li>
	<li>pb&amp;j sandwich</li>
</ul>
</div>

And added the script that brings the unordered list to life:

YUI().use('sortable', function(Y) {
    var sortable = new Y.Sortable({
        container: '#want-list',
        nodes: 'li',
        opacity: '.1'
    });
});

That was it, a fully user sortable list!

I also needed this list to fire an event when a list item order had been changed. The Drag & Drop (DD) Utility has some nifty events that conveniently work with the Sortable Utility. So, I just added the following to my above script:

var doSomething = function() {
    	alert('do something');
	};
	Y.DD.DDM.on('drop:hit', doSomething);

When a drop:hit event occurs, it calls the doSomething function. In this case the doSomething function fires up an alert that says “do something”. It’s pretty basic and a rather useless alert, but it does demo what I’m working to do.

Again, YUI 3 is so awesome, that I easily spent more time writing up this little post than I did in making my above requirements happen. That’s really amazing to me. YUI 3 documentation is great, tons of examples there too.

• View Example

Since they needed a site that they would be able to easily maintain, and this is 2010 after all, we decided that building it on the Joomla! CMS would be best for them. I’ve been using Joomla! a great deal recently to meet clients needs, and it’s really worked great for them too. It truly is amazing what open source offers.

The client also had a unique need to manage their properties in a way that didn’t exist in the Joomla! CMS. So I built them a custom component to handle that functionality. It was great, it makes use of Joomla’s built in admin, so it looks completely like the CMS interface, the client didn’t have to learn something completely new.

The component allows the client to add/update/delete business listings, and upload a photo that is automatically resized for them on upload. I used the WideImage library to handle the image resizing. I was thoroughly impressed with WideImage and highly recommend it and will surely be using it again.

The greatest part about this component to me was that I didn’t have to explain how to use it to the client, they just logged in and knew exactly what to do. As a developer, that’s the highest compliment I can think of is when somebody doesn’t notice your work because it just worked.

The site also makes use of the YUI2 CSS Grids for the site layout. I’ve been a huge fan of the YUI library in general, and found myself using them in yet another project (actually can’t think of the last project I haven’t really used YUI).

Since launching, the client has extended the text in the main navigation bar. It’s bumping a link to a new line, so I think I might contact them with a way to improve that. But besides that they’re doing an excellent job managing the site and it was a true pleasure working with them.

Check out www.indulgeinavalon.com

Currently it appears that they’re offering 18 fonts for use. While not a ton of fonts, it is a welcome addition.

Using the Google Font API couldn’t be easier! They offer a great getting started page. Hopefully more fonts will be added soon, and site won’t go too overboard incorporating the new fonts either.

We decided to build the website  on the Joomla! open source CMS (content management system). I’ve built many sites with Joomla! recently and each client has been very much pleased with the rich CMS functionality that we are able to deliver to them at a very reasonable cost. It really amazes me just how much functionality they are getting from an open source project.

We also relied on the Yahoo! YUI library to build the site as well. The site makes use of the following YUI components:

• CSS Reset
• CSS Fonts
• CSS Grids
• Yahoo Global Object
• DOM Collection
• Event Utility

YUI really helped us to work faster and knowing that their library is used and tested by Yahoo! for A-Grade Browser support is a real time saver.

The client did an excellent job in providing and organizing content for use on the site. I cannot stress how vital it is for a client to provide appropriate content in an organized manner for a site to be successful. They are the content experts and when we can mesh our respective areas of expertise a great site is almost always the result.

Since the business is new and this is their first website, special attention was spent to make sure that there is room for growth. The content regions and navigation elements all are easy to add or edit via Joomla! with little if any CSS adjust necessary to manage additional or changed content.

There are still some further tweaks and adjustments to be made to the site, but we did go live today, so check out www.landscapesandinteriors.com and see what great services and support that they offer. Again, it was a real pleasure working with this client, I had a great deal of fun and they are very satisfied with their site and that’s always great to know.

I primarily assisted with some Joomla development and configuration. Someone had been doing that role before me, so coming into a project that someone had already begun had it’s challenging moments (a white error screen of death for instance). But solving their issues and helping deliver a really cool finished (or very close to being finished) product was very gratifying.

I haven’t met a single member of the team who worked on this site in person, nor even spoke on the phone. It’s really amazing how people from all over can successfully collaborate on a project. I was fortunate to work with an extremely talented bunch of individuals on this project.

The primary tasks I assisted with were:

• setup and the automatic population of the blog. We used the CorePHP WordPress MU component to help us with this.
• Community Builder user registration. Ummm, there were moments I despised you Community Builder, but in the end we figured you out and you are doing your job.
• Pulling in the latest forum posts to their respective areas.
• Good deal of assist with other Joomla odds and ends. My hands got dirty with much PHP on this project. It was lots of fun.

Check out votemyvote.com, and let anyone you know who’s addicted to those reality shows about it.