After spending a good week trying to get around the non-safeness of class variables when threads are concerned, I finally got a release of my new plugin to share with you all! I haven’t done a whole lot of testing, but it does seem to work. So, if you have any bugs or suggestions, don’t hesitate to pass them on to tehdnite at gmail and I’ll see what I can do about them.

First things first, a brief introduction. Ajaxyxml is a mephisto plugin that makes it easy to fetch any (at least I’m pretty certain it should parse any) XML file from the internet and aggregate the contents into whatever form you want on your blog. The difference between this and the other plugins that parse XML data is that this works via teh Ajax. Instead of needing to flush your cache to update that small section of your blog that has dynamic content on it, it’s fetched on the fly. If you want to jump right in, go ahead and read the README file and get started. For those of you using the latest stable release of Mephisto (0.7.3), you’ll need to grab the 0.1 version, anyone using the most up to date mephisto from SVN can use either 0.1 or the latest trunk.

script/plugin install -x http://svn.dnite.org/mephisto_ajaxyxml/trunk

script/plugin install http://svn.dnite.org/mephisto_ajaxyxml/tags/0.1

AjaxyXml.connect_with map

You should be all set to use the plugin now. Restart mephisto to load up the plugin. Using the plugin is easy but requires 2 steps. First, you’ll want to create a partial file. Let’s use twitter as an example for this. Go to your admin interface for mephisto and select Design and New Template. We’ll add the following code.

<p>My current Twitter Status: {{ xml.text }}<br />
It was set on {{ xml.created_at }}</p>

Now let’s name it. This plugin needs it to be named a certain way. It must start with _ajaxy_ and end with the name of the element you wish to be updated on the template your going to be using this tag on. Let’s call it _ajaxy_twitter_status. Click Create Template and verify that it exists on the right. Mephisto should have appended a .liquid to the end.

<div id="twitter_status">Loading Twitter Status</div>
{% ajaxyxml url: 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/swemoney.xml', element: 'twitter_status', quantity: '1' %}

This will add a DIV that will say ‘Loading Twitter Status’ and an Ajax request right under it. As soon the Ajax request gets back, the twitter_status DIV will get updated. The only big ‘weird’ thing I found with this release is that the tag is really picky about line breaks. Just make sure there are NO line breaks in the {% ajaxyxml %} tag at all./ You can put the ajaxyxml liquid tag anywhere on your page as long as it lands after the element you wish to update with it. I like to throw mine at the bottom of the page.

That’s about it. I tried to make this introduction article as non-technical as possible, so for those of you who thought this was all obvious, I apologize. If you have any comments, suggestions, complaints, or whatever don’t be afraid to leave some comments! Enjoy!

UPDATE : I added some support for mootools, read about it here,