Book Image

WordPress 3.0 jQuery

Book Image

WordPress 3.0 jQuery

Overview of this book

Using jQuery you can create impressive animations and interactions which are simple to understand and easy to use. WordPress is the leading publishing platform that can be customized to power any type of site you like. But when you combine the power of jQuery with WordPress—the possibilities are infinite.The combination creates a powerhouse of possibilities for generating top-notch, professional websites with great usability features and eye catching visual enhancements. This easy-to-use guide will walk you through the ins and outs of creating sophisticated, professional enhancements and features, specially tailored to take advantage of the WordPress personal publishing platform. It will walk you through clear, step-by-step instructions to build several custom jQuery solutions for various types of hypothetical clients and also show you how to create a jQuery and WordPress Plugin.This book covers step-by-step instructions for creating robust and flexible jQuery solutions for today's top site enhancements: expanding/sliding content, rotating slideshows and other animation tricks, great uses of jQuery's UI plugin widgets as well as AJAX techniques. Along with these it will also show you best practices for jQuery and WordPress development. That means, you'll learn how to implement just about any jQuery enhancement you can dream of on a WordPress site and also learn how to do it with minimal edits to the site's theme and while allowing the site's content editors to continue adding content the way they've always been (usually with the WYSIWYG editor), and never having to worry that they'll forget or not know how to add a special attribute or custom HTML to a post to make the jQuery feature work.From development tools and setting up your WordPress sandbox, through enhancement tips and suggestions, to coding, testing and debugging, and ensuring that the WordPress content editor's workflow isn't interrupted by having to accommodate an enhancement with special HTML, this book covers the best practices for not only jQuery development but specifically jQuery within WordPress development.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Wordpress 3.0 jQuery
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface

Chapter 6. WordPress and jQuery's UI

We're now ready to take a look at jQuery's most popular plugin: UI. UI of course, stands for User Interface. The jQuery UI plugin takes many of the most popular tasks that the developers have already made simple through jQuery, and makes them even simpler. I know, it's hard to imagine it getting any easier, but that's exactly what this plugin does. Most importantly, while the enhanced effects are nice, the UI plugin provides interface widgets and an easy way to style or "theme" them without the need for coding up specific interface elements such as tabs, dialog boxes, and more.

In this chapter, we'll:

  • Take a look at the UI plugin and how to get started with it quickly

  • Learn how to apply jQuery UI widgets to our WordPress site, make it more intuitive, easier to understand content, and encourage users to take action

  • Learn how to implement popular UI features and widgets with common WordPress features

Let's get started.