There are a few big tree enhancements that have gone into SVN and will be in the 1.3 release. (You can see them in the nightlies now.)

1) Drop between
This lets you specify the ordering of nodes when dragging and dropping. You can also use it to reorder the nodes in a tree. Although the feature/parameter is called dropBetween, what it actually lets you do is drop the drag-node either "before" or "after" the target TreeNode, to become it's sibling, rather than onto the target TreeNode, to become it's child.

I checked in some changes over the past few days to support both horizontal menus (aka MenuBar) and vertical menus statically appearing on a page, rather than popping up. i.e., menus that are always visible.

Give it a whirl. For now, see the test_Menu.html test file for a demo. (Eventually we'll get the demos into the new doc.)

Dev.Opera recently asked us (SitePen) to write an article about Dojo: Introducing the Dojo Toolkit. The article provides an in-depth look at Dojo Core.

Opera is also making a small cash contribution to the Dojo Foundation in recognition of our efforts for writing a great article for their developer community.

A week or two ago I checked in a bunch of updates to ContentPane. The goal was to make "hidden" initialization work better, i.e., if a TabContainer had a ContentPane with some markup, including some widgets like Grid or Editor that won't initialize correctly when hidden.

The original plan was to use visibility:hidden rather than display:none, but that proved problematic on IE.

A few months ago I started hanging out in #dojo and noticed that there were a lot of common questions. With some input from phiggins, I compiled a top-10 collection of the most frequently stumbled-upon concepts in The Dojo Toolkit. You'll probably never see this on the Late Show but here's number 10:

10. #dojo

Dojo has a very helpful community (http://dojotoolkit.org/community) with some very good resources for those getting started and also for those who have been using dojo for a while. Some very useful "go to" websites are:

• http://dojotoolkit.org/

I am proud to announce what is now officially the coolest-numbered-dot-release in Dojo history: The Dojo Toolkit 1.2.3

Both 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 were released silently and were relatively short-lived. 1.2.3 is expected to be the last release of the 1.2 branch, and is very stable. This release includes several critical fixes to ContentPane, and many low-risk changes to the 1.2 release. It should be a 100% safe migration for 1.2 users, and offers better support for 1.1 users wishing to migrate.

As a project that is completely assisted and sponsored by the community, the Dojo Toolkit and Dojo Foundation need your help!

I recently added text on the Dojo Foundation site about getting involved and contributing, so I won't repeat that information here. Instead, I will focus on the areas where we (the Dojo Toolkit) need the most assistance:

• Documentation
• Testing and debugging

We're conducting a public Dojo Workshop in January. This twofour-day event will be in Phoenix online and will teach you all about Dojo. Full details are available at http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2008/11/19/affordable-dojo-workshop-open-to-... .

One of the more widely requested features we receive is for a full-fledged Dojo Calendar widget (think a lightweight version of iCal or Google Calendar rather than the more date picker like calendar we have in dojox.widget.Calendar).

I was recently contacted by Matt Simpson of Queens University in Canada, and after discussions, we decided that we'd see if we can get a calendar project rolling by starting something in dojoc, and then moving it to DojoX once it starts to evolve.

[Update] - On December 5th and 6th, we are going to organize a dojo.beer() in Munich, Germany.
After having a great meeting in Berlin in May this year, we though it was about time again, to meet, talk Dojo, maybe hack some code and enjoy life :)

Mayflower was so kind to offer a conference room of their office in Munich to hold a few talks, exchange know-how and talk Dojo, so our schedule will look like following:

Friday 5th:

Meetup for dinner, dojo.beer() at 8pm at following restaurant:

Café am Beethovenplatz
Hotel Mariandl

Goethestrasse 51