Joomla 1.5 is for sure a great CMS: it features lot of extensions, a rather clean XHTML output and its framework API is really powerfull. Moreover it’s built with MVC logic in mind, enabling web designers to use template overrides in their themes.
Despite all these advanced features Joomla 1.5 is still stuck at JS framework Mootools 1.11. The latest version of this framework, 1.2.x, introduced many new features and a complete re-engineered code. Due to these changes, Joomla developers plan to upgrade Mootools in the 1.6 release, to be able to spread code changes to all plugins, modules and components. Until that release we’ll be stuck at outdated, unsupported and often undocumented code.
This is an attempt to add Mootools 1.2 support to current Joomla 1.5.9 release. Let’s start:
Update: A new version of files presented in this post is available here!
Requirements:
- Nearly full compatibility with Mootools 1.11 to avoid errors
- Upgrade of Mootools plugins where possibile
- None or minimal Joomla core hacks
- Implementation of Mootools in legacy (1.0.x) components
1. Smooth Mootools upgrade.
First of all let’s download the latest version of Mootools Core and Mootools More (right now 1.2.1):Mootools 1.2.1 Full (28.51 kB)
Unzip the archive and place the two files in media/system/js/
Then download this compatibility file, which will make old 1.11 scripts work rather smoothly with the new framework, and place it in the same folder as above (update 05/22/09 added getValue, Json and window.onDomReady compatibility, thanx Toopixel):
Mootools 1.11 to 1.2.1 Compatibility File (1.97 kB)2. Plugins Upgrade.
One of the more usefull plugin shipped with Mootools is Squeezebox, used for the modal windows, here is the 1.2 Compatible version, ready to be placed in the above mentioned folder media/system/js/:
3-4. Let’s try some PHP
Since i want to touch Joomla Core files as less as possible, im going to use some little tricks to be able to use Mootools 1.2 just in the Frontend and on-demand from the template’s main index.php file.
Joomla is based on several PHP libraries placed in the libraries/ folder; one of them is the Joomla API, but we can find ezSQL (a database lib), PHPMailer (a mailing system) and phpgacl (an access list system). To take advantage of Joomla’s built-in libraries loading system and, at the same time, prevent overwrites by future releases, i created a folder called my_libs in libraries/ containing a class file: my_behavior class for Joomla 1.5.9 (1.13 kB)
Basically the class provides a static function which recalls the head part of Joomla document object, looks for Mootools and replaces it with the 1.2 version we uploaded before.
If Mootools is not found, then it’s simply loaded, extending it’s presence in the head of legacy 1.0.x components.
You can call this newly added class in your Joomla theme index.php by placing these lines of code before the head template tag:
<?php
JLoader::import( 'my_libs.behavior' );
MY_Behavior::mootoolsFix();
?>
<jdoc:include type="head" />If you need to switch back to v1.11 you can pass false as first argument to the function like this:
MY_Behavior::mootoolsFix(false);Note this!
This is just a test, it should work on a basic Joomla installation, anyway feel free to report errors and issues to improve the code.
Untill now, I’ve experienced that Virtuemart uses it’s own logic to load libraries, so it’s excluded by default.
Optionally you can exclude specific components by passing an array with their option value as second argument:
MY_Behavior::mootoolsFix(true,array("com_sobi2","com_comprofiler"));In SOBI2 an error will be issued on search form unless you set the registry option use_own_mootools to 0.
John 
dfediuk 
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jared 
Planet Crypton 
MalekO 
Alvin 
armand 
sandzaonline 
Rommel 
Alex 
Nuno 
Wow! I’ve learned a lot! Nice discussion on Mootools, thanks a lot!