I recently visited a local school website, and discovered (via the rather prominent link in the footer) that it was powered by Frog. Frog is a learning platform for schools - a bit like a web content management system but for learning resources, attendance data, grades and so on; but can also power a front-end website.

Being the curious web person that I am, I investigated the source code of the page. I noticed a reference to jQuery straight away. But getting over the table-based layout and the messy in-line Javascript code, I found the most interesting discoveries in their main.js file. Here are a few notable excerpts.

//folderid “hacked into” fileid

//still bit of a hack :-@
//we just are who we are and we are quite proud of who we are [actually]

//i could have just integrated this into meta_tagging.phtml, but i didnt…

//bit of a hack :-S

// Fix for modal dialogs. Well, maybe. Let’s see if we can break it.

// top document needs it’s own bits and bobs.

There are also some interesting lines in the menu scripts:

/*
Bugs:
parsing the menu details array is still a bit ropey when we are in edit mode
*/

// any changes to this file must be tested on ALL the above since browsers can disagree about little things
// note: so far this file works without any browser detection (but some object detection). its advisable to keep it that way.

the above code is to get a round the dhtml bug where the moseout event fires after a mouseover event so we could mouse over into a ne element and the event will fire. but a few seconds later the previous element will fire its mouseout event (grrr!)

//unless you access this property the script returns a permission denied when in a cross domain frame
insane_magic_variable=prev_window.location.search;

//the code below is for the benefit of the pendantic buggers at opera (we have to retrive the appended iframe or risk all sorts of bother)

// Frog 3 FUXXORS UP the positioning of the menu if the f3 edit button is present (contents are put in an extra div, so use that and take it into account)

// this is a bug fix for netscape 6 and it duplicates the end of teh previous function
// grrrrrrrr

One final gem from their Flash object insertion script.

Purpose: Insert a flash object via external javascript to get around the ‘click to activate’ IE thing.