Throughout this book we have examined many of the ways in which the jQuery library can be used to accomplish a wide variety of tasks. Yet one aspect that has remained relatively unexplored is jQuery’s extensibility. As powerful as the library is at its core, its elegant plug-in architecture has allowed developers to extend jQuery, making it an even more feature-rich library.

Although jQuery has been available for less than two years, it already supports over a hundred plug-ins—from small selector helpers to full-scale, user-interface widgets. In this chapter we’ll take a brief look at three popular jQuery plug-ins and then create a few of our own.

We’ve already discussed the power of plug-ins and created a simple one in Chapter 7. Here, we’ll look at the way for incorporating pre-existing plug-ins into our web pages and examine how to build our own plug-in in more detail.