Sexy CSS+JS Form

I was working on our new open source project that i think you will like and I was working on the registration page. This is what I got in the end and i will walk you trough the process with me. This new tutorial is about styling the forms of your website, I find it very good looking and very simple to implement. We will use simple CSS and some JavaScript.

Usually for inserting text into the inputs or our forms we set the value attribute with the text and then use javascript to check for different scenarios for doing some fancy things. This is different we will use labels to fill the text and move them under the inputs and then just do our magic with JS.

The JavaScript library that we will use to create this effect for our forms is Jquery

1. Creating the markup!

            <div id="login">
                <div class="sayit">Log In:</div>
                <form action="javascript:void(0)" onsubmit="login()" autocomplete="off">
                    <label for="username">Username</label>
                    <input type="text" id="username"/>
                    <label for="password">Password</label>
                    <input type="password" id="password"/>
                    <input type="submit" class="medium button green" value="Log me In"/>
                </form>
            </div>

The above code is our markup and as you can see is very simple and it can be changed as you like because the code that we will use for checking for different scenarios in javascript will work without necessary classes or ids. We have 2 inputs and 2 labels, one is password one is text and we can work with these ones, you can add as many as you like.

Now let’s style these bastards!

2. Use CSS to style the form elements!

input[type=text],input[type=password]{padding: 5px 10px; background-color: transparent;	position: relative; z-index: 2;}
label{position: absolute; z-index: 1;-webkit-transition: opacity 0.15s linear; color: #bababa; background-color: #FFFFFF; }

#login{width: 290px; margin: 0 auto;}
#login input[type=text],#login input[type=password]{width:270px; margin: 5px 0; font-size: 24px; font-weight: bold; border: 1px solid #ccc; -moz-border-radius:5px; -webkit-border-radius:5px; color: #595959;}
#login label{font-size: 24px; margin: 14px 10px;}

#login .sayit{font-size:24px; color: #595959; font-style: italic; padding-bottom: 5px;}

What we did here is make the label absolute so it will go under the input. This is important you will have to place the label before the input so remember this! The input will have a position relative and a z-index of 2 so we can be sure it will land above the label. Next we define the login div by using his id(#login). We use CSS3 for creating the round borders for the input and style the label by setting a big font-size to fit the input. The rest is pretty obvious, if you have trouble understanding this then let us know in the comments.

3. Make everything move with JS!

$(document).ready(function(){
    $.string(String.prototype);
    $("input,textarea").each(function (type) {
        $(this).focus(function () {
            if($(this).val().blank())
                $(this).prev("label").fadeTo('fast',0.45);
        });

        $(this).keypress(function () {
            $(this).prev("label").fadeTo('fast',0);
        });

        $(this).blur(function () {
            if($(this).val().blank()){
                $(this).prev("label").fadeTo('fast',1);
            }
        });
    });
});

We use here jQuery of course that we add using the google api like this:

        <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js"></script>

And one plugin that I use to extend the jQuery string properties and that is $.string plugin. After we do that we create the above code and we assign to input and textarea elements a focus, keypress and blur actions. We use the focus action to lower the labels opacity to 45% then on keypress we just hide it for good. Then on blur we check to see if anything was written in our sexy element and if not then we fade the label back to 100%. This is kind of everything we do here, pretty simple.

4. Showing of a demo and download source

I’ve set up a demo here: DEMO

The source code you can either pick it from the demo page or from here: SOURCE

5. Wrapping up!

So here is our nice form styling that you can use on your website and that can be done very easily. Feel free to leave us comments and suggestions. Thanks a lot!

Have fun coding!

JQUERY upload plugin

Sometimes we come into a problem that is a little harder to do when it comes to customizing and that is the file upload input. Well Andris Valums helps us with a plugin he created for jQuery.

The plugin requires jQuery 1.2 or above and allows users to upload multiple files without refreshing the page.

To make the plugin work you have to include jQuery and the plugin in your websites head.

%MINIFYHTMLa1a687730bfea19984975924c8e025d80%%MINIFYHTMLa1a687730bfea19984975924c8e025d81%

And after that you can add this for a div with a specific id:

$(document).ready(function(){

$.ajax_upload('#div_id', {
  // Location of the server-side upload script
  action: 'upload.php',
  // File upload name
  name: 'userfile',
  // Additional data to send
  data: {
    key1 : 'value',
    key2 : 'value2'
  },
  // Fired when user selects file
  // You can return false to cancel upload
  onSubmit: function(file, extension) {},
  // Fired when file upload is completed
  onComplete: function(file, response) {},
  // Fired when server returns the string
  onSuccess: function(file){},
  // Fired when server return something else
  onError: function(file, response){}
});

});

And after that just upload the file using:

if (move_uploaded_file($_FILES['userfile']['tmp_name'], $uploadfile)) {
  echo "success";
} else {
  echo "error";
}

You can find more info on: http://valums.com/projects/ajax-upload/ or check out the demo page : Demo

jQuery pagination

Description

When you have a a large list of items (e.g. search results or news articles), you can display them grouped in pages and present navigational elements to move from one page to another. This plugin creates these navigational elements.

Usage

Include the pagination plugin script and the pagination.css file in your HTML page. In your HTML body create a container tag pair that will hold the link elements. Give it an id attribute (e.g. “News-Pagination”)

After you have loaded the contents and know how many items you want to display overall, create the pagination like this:

	// First Parameter: number of items
	// Second Parameter: options object
	$("#News-Pagination").pagination(122, {
		items_per_page:20,
		callback:loadContents
	});

This will create the navigation links inside the container. You will see the numbers 1-7, the first number is highlighted. When you click on another number, the highlighting changes and your callback function “loadContents” is called.

The plugin is highly configurable through the option parameter and all elements can be styled separately.

You can check out a demo here.
And download the source code here.