Sneak preview: I’ve started working on another new PHP-based HTML and AJAX rendering class, called awfRadial. Click the thumbnails for a bigger storyboard image of rendering concepts.

The premise is simple: display between 1 and 48 rendered “objects” in radial form around a central element, each object having user configurable HTML, CSS, and AJAX properties for complete customization. This will be generic so that it can be implemented in many ways; I’ll probably release several additional wrapper classes for some common implementations such as radial context menu, or data drill-through applications.

Having read-up some on other attempts to create browser-happy radial menus, I’m assuming this will be a fairly daunting project, as most people have moved on to Flash or Java applets to make it work. I aim to make the end result as extensible as possible, but I always take the “crawl, walk, run” approach with new projects. So the first version will likely be rendered as a flat HTML table emulating a circular layout. To do this with raw CSS positioning will have to wait for a later release. The cross-browser issues relating to DIV positioning are my pet peeve and I want to at least get proof of concept functional before banging my head against IE6.

Tags: awfRadial, class, CSS, menu, PHP

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After Wes Friend’s earlier catch on the ajax errors in IE6, I did some more testing and, wouldn’t you know it, there are more things to be fixed for the errant browser… Currently known problems between awfDialog’s rendered output and IE6:

1. Some of the elements referenced using the SetCSS method don’t appear to get their CSS styles under IE6. Most notable is the Title element. You can still get around at least some of those issues by being more explicit with your title string, meaning you can embed the raw html to fix display properties using the SetTitle() method
2. A larger problem is the clipping region of the BodyPane div. Although everything should scale dynamically based on the width property you set, it seems IE6 is going to ignore this and render roughly the right 30pixels of the BodyPane outside the div, clipping it. And it is ignoring the “overflow” CSS attribute. I’m stumped at how to deal with that, but it is a real issue if you are in Wizard mode, as it ends up hiding the Next button. Anyone know how to trick IE6 regarding div overflow and clipping regions?

Tags: awfDialog, CSS, Internet Explorer

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I’m aware the ajax.js file provided with the Gradient Builder example in awfDialog is not compatible with IE 6. Thanks to Wes Friend for notifying me. There is an updated version of that file posted to the package.

Tags: AJAX, awfDialog, cross-browser, Internet Explorer, javascript

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Shortly after submitting the awfDialog class to PHPClasses I received the following email:

This message is to let you know that your package “awfDialog Wizard” was considered notable. Congratulations!

This means that the site users interested in packages that have something special, are being notified to pay special attention to your package.

Notable packages are carefully hand picked by a site moderator. The moderator that picked your package wrote the following comment:

“Interesting solution to render Web based multi-step user interfaces using AJAX for faster page switching.”

Not a bad start for my first raw PHP project. Now comes all the feedback to tell me all the PHP best practices in application design I was ignorant of…

Tags: awfDialog

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I’m forever playing with new web technologies, deciding which to add to my stable to tools and which to let fall by the wayside. I’ve written a few things over the years that were worth sharing with other developers, so this TestLab is a place to host them and offer limited support from. The “real” TestLab is a webserver and development environment I carry around with me on an 80GB portable drive.

Just to help prevent the onslaught of spam, I do require that you register and log in to post comments. So if you’re looking for help with any of my code I’d get that part out of the way first.

Tags: Notes, support

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