AJAX

Recently, for the first time with Drupal 6, I needed to create a form where a variable number of fields could be added to it by simply clicking a 'Add more' button. I wanted to design a node form where users could create a custom compilation album of their favourite tracks. However the number of tracks would vary from album to album and so I wanted a way for users to be able to add more fields to the form without reloading the page. Now, yes I could have used CCK to build this custom content type, but I wanted to see how this could be done using Drupal's FAPI alone.

One of the many great things about working at CivicActions is that we get a stipend for work we do for the community. This month I decided to use some of my stipend time to code up a proposed solution for Drupal core for dynamically loading paged content. Why should paged content be loaded through AJAX? Well, take the example of comments. You're viewing a page with lots of comments. You click a link to bring up the next 30 comments. You wait while the whole page refreshes.

I just ran across this on digg: 25 Code Snippets for Web Designers - Round up 25 of the Best CSS, scripts, html, javascript, Ajax and widgets that you can use on on your website or blog.

Yahoo has put together an extremely clever system that lets you wire together (remix, if you like your buzzwords) a variety of web services. An example (inspired my Bert Boerland) is a pipe that aggregates anything it can find about 'CivicActions' from eBay, Flickr, Google and Yahoo. It's a great tool, and an impressive editing UI. Of course - the fun part is that multiple pipes can be connected together!