15 October 06

Now! That's what I call jQuery plug-ins #1

In a possibly-unending series, I will be picking out the best of the best of jQuery plug-ins just for you. “Why” I hear you ask. The jQuery site is all wiki-based so anyone can edit any page, which can lead to a lot of noise, especially when it comes to touting plug-ins. Some of the plug-ins on the site aren’t really plug-ins as such, they’re more a way of coding with jQuery to achieve an aim, rather than dropping a simple script in which will work instantly.

So I will be picking five very useful plug-ins for your use:

Interface
The script.aculo.us of jQuery. More of a library of plug-ins really, it features everything from drag and drop to visual effects. It’s maybe not as smooth as script.aculo.us but a lot, lot lighter, and the coding is just as easy [$(’#drag’).Draggable(); as an example of making an area draggable]

tableSorter
A plug-in that does what it says on the tin, it sorts tables whenever you click on the relevant column header. It even works with numbers, dates and times. Also it features table striping, and column highlighting, and most importantly, it works quickly with very large tables.

jQuery easing
When most non-Ajax developers talk about Ajax, they tend to talk about DHTML. People always seem overly impressed with small animations within HTML. jQuery’s strong point isn’t animation, which is why a plug-in like this is good for the success of the Javascript library as a whole.

jQuery Corner
Rounded corners have always been a pet hate of mine, which is why I like this plug-in so much. Anyone who can make them as easy as $(”#box”).corner() to make as possible deserves a gold star, or maybe a medal.

jCarousel
For years, carousels had been the domain of Flash, but until recently, when Flickr showed us how to do it properly. This plug-in shows how to easily implement a carousel, which is not only unobtrusive, but looks really nice too.

And obviously, I can’t blog about jQuery plug-ins without mentioning my quickSearch and pager which aim to be as easily implementable as the above plug-ins!

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