Introduction

The Unobtrusive Fast-filter Dropdown (UFD) is a fork from sexy-combo. This page explains the rationale.

Details

The main developer of UFD initially intended to enrich the sexy-combo for all its current users in a few important areas:

• Performance with large lists
• Improved event handling
• Better iE6 z-index support

During the development of these improvements, lots of features had to be dropped or changed. The new plugin ended up not being compatible with the previous versions in a few ways, and the plugin is in effect quite different.

Some of the potentially important removed features include:

• Multiple selection in a single combo (ie <select multiple .. >)
• Custom filter functions (UFD uses a trie implementation)
• Backwards compatibility with CSS skins
• Many configuration options
• JSON support (might be reintroduced)
• Custom callbacks (UFD triggers events on original select instead)

Some of these may be re-inserted in time, but the implementation and motivation has changed lots from sexy-combo.

Sexy-combo also had some releases sponsored by a company, and removal of features that may be important to them seems unfair. And finally, the name sexy-combo name may be a minus for the more conservative uses (corporate etc.).

For these reasons, it seemed better to fork the project, hence the "Unobtrusive Fast-filter Dropdown" was born.

Why the fork not?