We’re pleased to announce the release of our latest symfony plugin, sfLightWindowPlugin. sfLightWindowPlugin provides great helper functions for LightWindow v2.0. LightWindow is a great improvement over the original Lightbox 2 script, and includes handlers for virtually all media types, including flash, quicktime, youtube videos, images, remote content, inline content, and more. Using this plugin, it’s amazingly simple to add these great effects to your symfony site.

Check out the sfLightWindowPlugin Demo for a closer look. You won’t be disappointed!

To download the sfLightWindowPlugin, visit the wiki page for download and installation instructions.

Stereolabels unobtrusively places form input labels inside the form inputs themselves. Upon page load, the script crawls the DOM for labels with the specified class name (default is ‘inside’) and places the label text inside the input field. Upon clicking the field, the label is removed. When the element loses focus, if there is no input the label returns. This behavior is only applied to text, textarea, and password input fields.

Information and a download are available in our code section: Stereolabels

In doing some research today for a client, I learned that it is indeed possible to track ajax requests with Google Analytics. All you have to do is make a call to the urchinTracker passing it the page name of the request and it will do the rest. Typically you will want to do this in the code section that handles the ajax response:

var myAjax = new Ajax.Request(
  url,
  {
    method: 'get',
    parameters: pars,
    onComplete: function() { urchinTracker("/yourAjaxPageName" ); }
  }
); 

More on this can be found in the Google Analytics Help Center.

Just discovered this by accident: If you want a list of files in your project or any sub directory, drag the item from the file drawer into a document. A nicely formatted list of all of the files will automatically be placed into your doc. Now… if only I needed it. Maybe someday.

Using an SSH key to connect to the server allows you to log in without entering your password.

To generate an SSH key on Mac OS X or Linux machines:

• Open a Terminal window and enter:

ssh-keygen -d

Unless you set an alternative local storage location when prompted, your public key will be stored in ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub. For increased security enter a passphrase when prompted, however this is probably not necessary unless many people use your computer.

• At the command line enter the following and copy the output to the clipboard.

cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub

• Log in to the server.
• Switch into the ssh directory:

cd .ssh

• Type:

vi authorized_keys

• Paste your public key from the clipboard, then save and exit vi.