Facelift has been downloaded over 6,000 times in the last four weeks.  I never thought that it would become so popular so fast.  I am actually pretty amazed and just happy that everyone is finding it useful!

Version 1.2 has just been released out of beta and as always, I urge anyone who finds any bugs to report them in the forums.

Look forward to many new plugins as well as documentation on how to make your own — finally!

With much delay Facelift v1.2 is here.  If you are still using v1.1.1 you are crazy, especially now that v1.2 is out of beta. Download Now!

FLIR v1.2 includes so many new features over v1.1.1 that I’m not even going to list them all here.  Not much has changed since v1.2 beta 4 except some bug fixes.

The one thing worth mentioning is the inclusion of a FLIR Javascript plugin entitled RefreshImages.  You can read more about it, as well as keep up with some of the more advanced features of Facelift at the new detailed facelift examples page.
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UPDATE 9/13: I’ve fixed the bug and will be releasing the fixed version sometime tomorrow.

There is a bug in Facelift that is causing all images to be generated with a white background. The temporary fix is to disable GIF/JPG support until I can release a fixed version. You only have to modify one line of code to fix and FLIR will behave as it did before with transparent PNG images.

You can read more about the problem and get the fix here.

Facelift v1.2 beta 4 introduces a new feature called the Font Collection.  A Font Collection is just that, a collection of similarly faced fonts in various styles.  This means that you no longer have to create a separate entry for Your Font and Your Font Italic.  By combining the Font Collection with the CSS values set in your web page, FLIR can intelligently detect which font variant to use.
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I was all set to release the final v1.2 but instead I went crazy and added a bunch of new functionality.  So, I am releasing v1.2 beta 4.

• Font Collections
• Basic Callback Functions
• Better error handling
• Bug in generateURL causing HTML not to be sanitized
• Added functionality/bug fixes for “wrap” mode.  Better line-height support.
• Rewrote element replacement algorithm. You no longer need to encapsulate plain text in span elements to have it replaced.  The new algo is recursive so it can replace any number of child elements.  You could even run it on document.body if you wanted to!
• Added flir-image and flir-span classnames to the elements flir creates
• Javascript Plugin support!
• Moved DetectImageState code from facelift.js into a Javascript plugin
• querySelectorAll support for the browsers that support it (Safari, FF3.1 alpha)
• Font size modifier for cSize in FLIRStyle. You can now specify a font size calculation to be applied against the CSS font size.  For example, if you want the generated image to have a font size that is 140% the one you specified in your CSS you could do cSize:’*1.4′.  All font sizes will then be multipled by 1.4.
• FLIRStyle.buildURL no longer requires an HTML object to be passed
• Hover caching problems fixed.  Better hover style support.
• JPG and GIF support! Set the “output” option in FLIRStyle.  The default output option is auto.  Auto will cause the generated image to be a transparent png if the element doesn’t have a background color set.  Otherwise it will use GIF.
• Hover now only works with <A> elements.

My notebook died and I had to buy a replacement.  I should be back online by tomorrow.

Bryson on the forums found a pretty big bug today that is causing images not to be cached by web browsers.

This means that each time a user returns to your web page or hovers over a link they are being forced to re-download the generated image.  The image is still being cached locally by Facelift so the images aren’t being regenerated.

This is a pretty huge bug in my eyes and you can either download the fixed version from the download page, or make the following changes yourself:
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Shortly after putting up v1.2 beta 3 for download I noticed a problem. It has been fixed and Facelift is back to working in IE again. If you’ve already downloaded v1.2 b3 you can make the change yourself or you could download v1.2 beta 3-2.
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Facelift offers several options to handle many different situations.  In this post, we will take a look at a few options that may be useful to your situation. In this post realFontHeight, findEmbededFonts, and checkImageSupport are covered as well as a slightly more in-depth look at the FLIR.init function.
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A lot has gone into Facelift v1.2 beta 3 to make it a lot better than previous versions.  This will be the last beta before v1.2 final.

Upgrading

To upgrade, move the following files to your facelift folder: flir.js, generate.php, and inc-flir.php. Also copy the files in the plugins directory if needed.

config-flir.php has not changed and therefore does not need to be modified.
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Facelift can be used for more than just adding decorative headers to your web pages.  Combine Facelift with a little bit of Javascript and you can really do some pretty cool things.  This is the first part in a series of posts detailing what you can do to take Facelift further.
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I was bored tonight so I decided to throw something together that I’d been thinking about:  Combing Facelift with an input textbox.

I quickly threw together a proof of concept and it actually came out pretty well.  Of course, this really doesn’t have any real world application but it is kinda cool.

Open the Dynamic Font Textbox Test Page

Facelift v1.2 b3 is coming very soon and I’ll also be including an upgraded and fixed QuickEffects plugin.

It was recently brought to my attention that Facelift Image Replacement wasn’t displaying in all browsers properly when images were turned off.  It seems I only tested this scenario in Firefox 3, which beautifully handles the situation.

The rest of the browsers weren’t so nice.  Safari displays nothing, IE displays a box with the alt text in an ugly small font, and Opera puts a box around the text.
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I’m very happy that people are finding Facelift useful. It is starting to pop up on websites around the internet and it is quickly gaining popularity. A lot of time and energy has gone into the creation and maintenance of Facelift and I hope to continue this for as long as it is needed.

A lot of free software projects around the internet simply ask for donations to keep the project going. However, personally, I’ve never been a big fan of donations, at least not for my projects. After all, I am creating these projects for purely selfish reasons and making them available to others. So, I thought, “How could I get compensated for the work I’m putting into Facelift and give something (besides Facelift) in return?”
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Facelift v1.2 beta 2 is available and is definitely the best version yet with bug fixes and features galore.  Hover and complete UTF8 support come to mind.  Instructions to upgrade are at the end of this post.  Download Facelift v1.2 beta 2
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And it can be downloaded at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facelift-image-replacement/

The Facelift plugin for the popular CMS is now available for versions 5.x and 6.x and stable.  Get to downloading Drupers!

http://drupal.org/project/flir

I’ve been working on facelift v1.2 and one of the upgrades is element hovers.  And I’ve done it!  Or so I thought… they work like a dream in all browsers except Internet Explorer.  They just wouldn’t change colors.

After investigating further, I found out that IE doesn’t apply the :hover CSS changes until AFTER the mouseover event is done.  Which means, you can’t get an elements :hover style.

After playing around for a bit, I did discover a less-than-elegant solution to this problem that I’m going to have to implement, even though I don’t want to.  Using setTimeout to retrieve the currentStyle will allow you to get the proper value during the event, even when setTimeout’s delay is set to 0.  I’m not sure why this works, but it does.

I’ve setup a test page that illustrates the problem and the solution.  View “IE Mouseover currentStyle Problem” Test Page.

For all you Drupal users out there I have some good news.  A beta plugin to integrate facelift with your drupal installation is available as of today.  Bryan Ollendyke started the project and it is available for download at http://drupal.org/project/flir.

I’ve created http://forums.mawhorter.net/.  Use them to discuss any issues you may have with any of my projects.  If you need help, have a suggestion, or anything else — the forums are the place to go!

I decided to go with PunBB because… well, I didn’t really have a reason.  I’ve installed most of the other forums but haven’t used PunBB so I figured I’d give it a shot.  It installed without issue and it took a bit of time to customize.  But it is up and running!

So head over to http://forums.mawhorter.net/ and register! Be amazed by the amazing lack of customizations I’ve done to the PunBB default theme.  And above all, have fun.