jQuery is the most famous JavaScript library. If you use jQuery a lot, it may be a good idea to start packaging your code into plugins. A jQuery plugin is simply a way to put your code into a package, which makes it easier to maintain your code and use it across different projects. Although basic scripting is relatively straightforward, writing plugins can leave people scratching their heads.
With this exhaustive guide in hand, you can start building your own plugins in a matter of minutes! This book takes you beyond the basics of jQuery and enables you to take full advantage of jQuery's powerful plugin architecture to deliver highly interactive content to your website viewers.
This book contains all the information you need to successfully author your very own jQuery plugin with a particular focus on the practical aspect of design and development.
This book will also cover some details of real-life plugins and explain their functioning to gain a better understanding of the overall concept of plugin development and jQuery plugin architecture.
Different topics regarding plugin development are discussed, and you will learn how to develop many types of add-ons, ranging from media plugins (such as slideshows, video and audio controls, and so on) to various utilities (image pre-loading, handling cookies). You will also learn the use and applications of jQuery effects and animations (sliding, fading, and combined animations) to eventually demonstrate how all of these plugins can be merged and give birth to a new, more complex, and multipurpose script that comes in handy in a lot of situations.
Chapter 1, What is jQuery About?, covers what jQuery is and why we should use and prefer it over other libraries. Some basic concepts, as well as some history, are covered in this chapter that acts as an introduction to the real topic of the book.
Chapter 2, Plugins Basics, is our first real approach to jQuery plugins. It provides an in-depth description of jQuery's own plugin architecture, providing some examples and sample applications for some of the most popular plugins.
Chapter 3, Our First jQuery Plugin, as its name suggests, is about creating our first, working, and fantastic jQuery plugin! Step-by-step instructions are provided in order to guide even very beginners to the successful realization of their first plugin.
Chapter 4, Media Plugins: Images Plugins, discusses how images play a big role in today's Internet. Since we don't want to be left out, nor behind, in this chapter, we do our best to create a jQuery plugin that is very easy to use, customize, and at the same time, very effective and good looking. Besides, a gallery-like plugin will certainly enhance the user experience of our web pages!
Chapter 5, Media Plugins: Audio Plugins, shows us how, after images, sounds too can be used in a variety of different ways to hold the visitor's attention. Not only will we learn how to develop a jQuery-based audio player plugin, but we will also analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the HTML5 audio tag, compared to JavaScript solutions.
Chapter 6, Media Plugins: Video Plugins, presents a detailed guide to the creation of a video player plugin, and also offers some hints on how to better display video objects on a web page with the aid of JavaScript and/or HTML code.
Chapter 7, Form Plugins, shows a handful of different, but all extremely useful, plugins we can develop in order to improve our forms and offer an enhanced user experience on our website. A number of jQuery plugins are coded, step-by-step, and discussed to better understand what to use, how to use it, and in what circumstances.
Chapter 8, User Interface Plugins, offers many plugin examples and explains how the developer should tackle the problem, in such a way that the final result can be easily modified and integrated into an organized project.
Chapter 9, User Interface Plugins: Tooltip Plugins, explains that to get a fully working tooltip plugin, a series of preliminary steps is required. These include understanding mouse movement and events, positioning through CSS rules, and, last but not least, interaction with jQuery code to actually show and hide the tooltip element at our will.
Chapter 10, User Interface Plugins: Menu and Navigation Plugins, discusses how developing menu and navigation plugins with some additional effects to enhance their appearance and user experience is rather simple. The principles are explained in this chapter, as well as a number of different approaches that we might want to use to obtain a menu plugin.
Chapter 11, Animation Plugins, discusses how fun-to-activate and nice-to-look-at animation plugins play one of the most important roles when it comes to user interaction. Be it a moving image or a bouncing shape, they are always worth the time spent coding them and actually amuse the visitor. We will learn how to make things move, bounce, fade in and away—nothing more, nothing less.
Chapter 12, Utility Plugins, shows how creating utility plugins (which can be easily used thanks to jQuery's own internal structure and which allow for a very effective integration) is a big plus. If we need some kind of function or method to take care of some repetitive task, we could speed up the process with just a few lines of code.
Chapter 13, Top jQuery Plugins, is a selection of the top 10 plugins. It briefly shows how they are customized on a website, their uses, their advantages and disadvantages, as well as provides a basic documentation that readers can easily use and refer to when (and if) they decide to mess with any of the plugins discussed in this chapter.
Appendix A, Tools, reference, and final recommendations, contains some useful jQuery-related links and offline resources for further reference.
This book is for anyone who wants to have a better understanding of the dynamics of jQuery when plugins come into play, as well as for those who are willing to push jQuery to its limits and develop awesome plugins to use on their websites. A little background information about JavaScript and jQuery cannot harm anyone, but even very beginners can have a chance to be introduced to the wonderful world of jQuery.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions on how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
1. Action 1
2. Action 2
3. Action 3
Instructions often need some extra explanation so that they make sense, so they are followed with:
This heading explains the working of tasks or instructions that you have just completed.
You will also find some other learning aids in the book, including:
These set practical challenges and give you ideas for experimenting with what you have learned.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
jQuery.fn.txtHover = function() {
return this.each(function() {
jQuery(this).hover(function() {
jQuery(this).text("Mouse hovered");
});
});
};
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "To enable the Web Inspector, open Preferences, go to the Advanced tab, and select the Show develop menu in the menu bar item".
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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