Ocular Layout Library version 0.20 Released

[eluser]kilishan[/eluser]
Just released version 0.20 of the Ocular Layout Library.

What is Ocular?
While originally inspired by Rails' ActiveView library, Ocular has started to take on a life of it's own in what I hope is a very CI fashion. Here's the (mostly) complete feature list:

NOTE: New or updated features are in italics.

* Easy to use for designers and coders both.
* Simple creation of "static" html pages.
* Use multiple site templates for your site.
* Automatically finds views and partials based on controller/function being ran.
* stylesheet and javascript helpers that compile the files into 1 file to download, increasing page display performance.
* Easily store data for use in the views from within any function, anywhere.
* Automatically creates page titles, though they can (and frequently should) be overridden.
* Automatically creates body id's that can be overridden, and can easily set body class tags, also.
* Encourages organization - specifically good for large sites.
* Works both as a standard library/helpers/etc, or as a Matchbox module.
* Follows the "Convention, not Configuration" mindset, saving a lot of time during development.

This release also includes a number of smaller performance tweaks, and vastly updated source code documentation.

Where can I get it?
The files, and complete documentation, can found at it's Google Code page.

What's coming?
While the roadmap can be seen here, the major things for the next release are:

* Per-view caching (so you're partials can be cached or not)
* Flash session data functions
* Truly automatic "static" pages that will display views that are available even when a controller doesn't exist for that path.
* and functions to make setting the tabs on your site active a piece of cake (though there's already functions that can work for it now!)

Hope you find it helpful!

[eluser]kilishan[/eluser]
Thanks to a couple of comments on the Google Code page, a couple of bugs have been fixed that probably frustrated a bunch of first-time users.

You can see the changes here.

I've noticed a fair number of downloads of the code, but no comments, so I don't know if it's working for everyone or not. I'd love to hear any comments/suggestions/success stories or interesting uses that people are finding with it.

[eluser]Beren[/eluser]
kilishan, just wanted to say thanks for the ocular library, I was using it previously but have now stopped because no matter what I do I simply cannot get it to work as a matchbox module (both using 1.5.4 and SVN trunk) - I don't know what's wrong, I've spent a good couple of hours trying to debug. Anyways, not to put you off, just wanted to say thanks for the great library (on my old app it's working like a charm!!), I'm now using a custom written layout library of my own, a pale imitation of Ocular feature wise but alas I needed to press on with development of the rest of the app. Best of luck for the future!

[eluser]kilishan[/eluser]
[quote author="beren" date="1200352076"]kilishan, just wanted to say thanks for the ocular library, I was using it previously but have now stopped because no matter what I do I simply cannot get it to work as a matchbox module (both using 1.5.4 and SVN trunk) - I don't know what's wrong, I've spent a good couple of hours trying to debug. Anyways, not to put you off, just wanted to say thanks for the great library (on my old app it's working like a charm!!), I'm now using a custom written layout library of my own, a pale imitation of Ocular feature wise but alas I needed to press on with development of the rest of the app. Best of luck for the future![/quote]

beren -

Glad to hear it helped on a previous project! That makes my day.

What kind of problems were you running into? I did notice a couple of errors that slipped through into the 0.20 release, which have been fixed and released as 0.21 on the Google Code site. Don't know if those fixed what you running into. Let me know, though, and I'll check into that.

Thanks

[eluser]bijon[/eluser]
kilishan,Thanks for your nice effort. Well can you give a complete small example with the controller, mysql and included css and javascript. If that then it can be learn easily.

Thanks
Saidur Rahman

[eluser]Unknown[/eluser]
Gonna give this a quick run-through now to see if it fits nicely for my app. I believe it will, as it appears to be very similar to the layout library I've developed for a few of my apps.

I will post feedback/bugs/praise here, and I'm looking forward to playing with this. Thanks, kilishan!

[eluser]kilishan[/eluser]
[quote author="bijon" date="1200378773"]kilishan,Thanks for your nice effort. Well can you give a complete small example with the controller, mysql and included css and javascript. If that then it can be learn easily.

Thanks
Saidur Rahman[/quote]

Saidur -

Absolutely. That should be pretty easy since it doesn't really require a db or anything to function. I'll put something together as soon as I get another job wrapped up and let you all know.


groovywd -

Excellent - I'm looking forward to seeing how else this library can fall apart Truthfully, though, I really am. I want to get this as stable as it can be, because I think it's pretty dead simple to use, and works well for both designers and developers, though I've still got a few things to add until I'm happy with it... Just look at the roadmap on googlecode.

Oh, and yes, I'm more than willing to work with others on this!

[eluser]Jon L[/eluser]
nice job kilishan.

one issue I noticed, and this may be due to me using SVN Trunk:
get_active_controller doesn't work when a default_controller is being used

more specifically, this code:

Code:

// Get our default controller from our extended URI class
    return $CI->uri->default_controller();

I changed the above code to:

Code:

$RTR =& load_class('Router');
        return $RTR->default_controller;

That solved the problem for me.

I already have your library in use on my site (not 100% complete, just tossing something together right now) @ http://www.phpsitesolutions.com

I'm using your static pages tutorial, thanks for that, now I'm wishing the active tabs tutorial was completed ;-)

[eluser]kilishan[/eluser]
Yeah, I ran into some issues with that myself last week. It's one of those things where I had it working and then started into another problem in the same area and messed it up, then forgot to go back and check it. I believe it's fixed now in the 0.21 release.

Glad to hear it's working otherwise, though!

[eluser]Jon L[/eluser]
Actually, that is the 0.21 release :-X