Up The Moo Herd MooTools Tips and Tricks

MooTools has always been my Javascript framework of choice. I won’t go into evangelist mode and start preaching of the merits of using MooTools instead of Framework X, because it’s been done before and frankly, these library wars are just starting to get annoying. It suffices to say that I know that MooTools is not only good at what it aims to do (which is to make programming Javascript easier), but it also inspires me to write good code.

Now while I may proclaim myself as a MooTools fanboy, a quick scan of my sparse archive probably wouldn’t show that. But I want to give some love back to the framework. And so I’m writing a series of articles geared towards people who already know the basics of MooTools, but want to go a step up the herd.

Not A Tutorial

Let me repeat that: this series is for people who already know the basics of MooTools. It’s not my intention to write an introductory series about the framework, since there are already a bunch of awesome people who did just that (see next section for links).

What I do want to do is to showcase some of the finer details of MooTools. These are the things that don’t usually come with the documentation, but instead are learned by writing code, experimenting with the framework and interacting with the members of the community.

And speaking of community, I also encourage you to share your pro-tips by posting your comments. It’ll be a great way to share some nifty stuff you’ve discovered.

(By the way, the title of the series, as you might have guessed, is a play on words. You know: MooTools, Moo, Cow, Herd. You get the idea. I’m not being offensive here, so please don’t interpret it like it’s some sort of derogatory joke.)

What’s In Store

Here’s a partial list of topics that’ll be discussed in the series (together with the link if they’re already available):

• Playing Fetch: The DOM Fetcher Functions (Dollar and Double-Dollar, and other element fetcher methods).
• Native Flora and Fauna: Natives, Generics and Extending the Language
• It’s Classy, Not Classic: Classes, Constructors, Singletons and Privates
• There’s A Class For This: Mutators, Inheritance and Mixins
• Evident Utensil: Utility Functions and Hidden Methods
• Down and Out: Element and Elements
• Tricks in Core Classes
• Stuff That’s Useful, But Hard to Categorize

(Update, Oct. 25 2009: Fx has been removed from the topics and replaced with DOM tips and tricks.)

Again, this is a partial list of topics–I might add or remove items from the list in the coming days as I write the other stuff, but right now, that’s the ladder we’ll use.

You might have noticed that most of the topics are related to MooTools-Core, and that’s deliberate. MooTools-More is a whole other beast, one that’s steadily growing, and it really deserves a series of its own. I’m not sure whether writing that series will be part of my plans, but I don’t want to close my door for that one.

But I Don’t Know MooTools

Now if you don’t know much about MooTools (or Javascript in general) yet, then don’t despair. There are several tutorials available that’ll help you get started, but I recommend these three:

• Help I Don’t Know Javascript
• The MooTorial
• 30 Days of MooTools

Up We Go!

The first part of the series is already posted, and the following parts will be posted as soon as I finish them.

Of course, I’m a bit of a haphazard blogger, so there’s no scheduled time for this one. That being said, I advice you to bookmark this page or subscribe to the RSS feed, so you’ll get updates when the new parts are posted. You can also follow me on Twitter (@keeto) for more details.

So let’s start moving up!