[Phpwebsite-developers] A couple early observations while modding for 1.x

[Verdon V. <ve...@ve...>]

Hi :)

A couple early observations while writing a mod for the new version.  
Matt, if you're reading and would like me to put these in a tracker,  
I will. Let me know where.

First, I'm having fun! I also appreciate the documentation that has  
already been done. It has really helped getting going.

1) Location of settings.php in docs/Settings_Class.txt is wrong,  
still says to put settings.php in /mod/mymod/conf and it should say / 
mod/mymod/inc


2) It would be nice if there was a way to have /core/class/Form.php  
prepend a required indicator to a field label. Maybe something like  
'<span class="error">*</span>&nbsp;' could be prepended to a field  
label if the label was called like...

$form->setLabel('email', _('Contact E-mail'), $required) or...

$form->setLabel('email', _('Contact E-mail'))
$form->setRequired('email')

... at first I tried just adding it to my label string, not realizing  
the basic label value also gets added as a var to the actual field. Doh!


3) The DHTML Calendar js_calendar, as it currently is, cannot be used  
on a page that has more than one form, unless your form happens to be  
the first one on the page. It took me a while to figure out why I  
couldn't get this to work (couldn't see the forest for the trees) but  
the fix seems simple enough. What I outline below works fine for me.  
I don't know if it would cause problems min browsers that I don't  
have, but I don't think so...

i) Add...

if (!isset($data['form_name'])) {
     $data['form_name'] = '0';
} else {
     $data['form_name'] = $data['form_name'];
}

...near the top of /javascript/js_calendar/default.php


ii) Then in body.js, and body2.js in /javascript/js_calendar/ change  
all instances of forms[0] to forms['{form_name}']


iii) Now a mod developer can send

$js_vars['form_name'] = 'my_form_name';
$js_vars['date_name'] = 'my_date';
$js_vars['type']      = 'text';
$template['PICK_CAL'] = javascript('js_calendar', $js_vars);


4) Now I have to figure out the best way to work with image uploads.

Cheers,
verdon