Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By : Natalie Maclees
Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By: Natalie Maclees

Overview of this book

jQuery is awesome for designers ñ it builds easily on the CSS and HTML you already know and allows you to create impressive effects with just a few lines of code. However, without a background in programming, JavaScript ñ on which jQuery is built ñ can feel intimidating and impossible to grasp. This book will show you how simple it can be to learn the basics and then extend your capabilities by taking advantage of jQuery plugins.jQuery for Designers offers approachable lessons for designers with little or no background in JavaScript. The book begins by introducing the jQuery library and a small and simple introduction to JavaScript. Then you'll step through a few simple tasks to get your feet wet before diving into using plugins to quickly and simply add complex effects with just a few lines of code.You'll be surprised at how far you can get with JavaScript when you start with the power of the jQuery library and this book will show you how. We'll cover common interface widgets and effects such as tabbed interfaces, custom tooltips, and custom scrollbars. You'll learn how to create an animated navigation menu and how to add simple AJAX effects to enhance your site visitors' experience. Then we'll wrap up with interactive data grids which make sorting and searching data easy.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
jQuery for Designers Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – incorporating custom animation


Follow these steps to incorporate custom animations to your menu:

  1. Fading the menu in means that the menu opacity is animating from 0 to 100 percent. I'd rather animate the height of the submenu, so that the submenu slides into view. To do that, open your scripts.js file and we'll customize the animation value inside the superfish() method:

      $(document).ready(function(){
        $('#sfNav').superfish({
          animation:  {height:'show'}
        });
      });

    Just adding a value here will override the default behavior of the plugin and replace it with the animation we choose instead.

  2. Now when you refresh the page in a browser, you'll see the submenus slide into view instead of fade in, which is a much more fitting animation for the CSS I've used to style the menus.

What just happened?

We took advantage of one of the customization options for the Superfish plugin to change the show animation of the nested subnavigation links. There are more customization options...