Useful jQuery Plugins

jQuery Form

The jQuery Form Plugin allows you to easily and unobtrusively upgrade HTML forms to use AJAX The main methods, ajaxForm and ajaxSubmit

, gather information from the form element to determine how to manage the submit process. Both of these methods support numerous options which allows you to have full control over how the data is submitted. Submitting a form with AJAX doesn't get any easier than this!

Autocomplete

Autocomplete an input field to enable users quickly finding and selecting some value, leveraging searching and filtering.

By giving an autocompleted field focus or entering something into it, the plugin starts searching for matching entries and displays a list of values to choose from. By entering more characters, the user can filter down the list to better matches.

Validate forms like you've never been validating before!

"But doesn't jQuery make it so very easy to write your own validation plugin?" Sure, but there still are a lot of subtleties that you have to worry about: You need a standard library of validation methods (think of emails, URLs, credit card numbers). You need to place error messages in the DOM and show and hide them when appropriate. You want to react to more than just a submit event, like keyup and blur. You may need different ways to specify validation rules, based on the server-side enviroment you are using on different projects. And after all, you don't want to reinvent the wheel, do you?

Table Sorter

tablesorter is a jQuery plugin for turning a standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes. tablesorter can successfully parse and sort many types of data including linked data in a cell. It has many useful features including:

• Multi-column sorting
• Parsers for sorting text, URIs, integers, currency, floats, IP addresses, dates (ISO, long and short formats), time. Add your own easily
• Support for ROWSPAN and COLSPAN on TH elements
• Support secondary "hidden" sorting (e.g., maintain alphabetical sort when sorting on other criteria)
• Extensibility via widget system
• Cross-browser: IE 6.0+, FF 2+, Safari 2.0+, Opera 9.0+
• Small code size

Select Manipulation

Very useful plugin for select and options manipulation

Super Fish Menu

Superfish is an enhanced Suckerfish-style menu jQuery plugin that takes an existing pure CSS drop-down menu (so it degrades gracefully without JavaScript) and adds the following much-sought-after enhancements:

• Suckerfish-style hover support for IE6. The class added is “sfHover” by default but can be changed via the options object,
• Timed delay on mouseout to be more forgiving of mouse-piloting errors. Default is 800 milliseconds but can be changed via the options object
• Animation of sub-menu reveal. uses a fade-in by default but can be given a custom object to be used in the first argument of the animate function. The animation speed is also customisable but is set to “normal” by default
• Keyboard accessibility. Tab through the links and the relevant sub-menus are revealed and hidden as needed
• Supports the hoverIntent plugin. Superfish automatically detects the presence of Brian Cherne’s hoverIntent plugin and uses its advanced hover behaviour for the mouseovers (mouseout delays are handled by Superfish regardless of the presence of hoverIntent). Using this is only an option, but a nice one. The examples on this page are using hoverIntent. If for some reason you want to use hoverIntent on your page for other plugins but do not want Superfish to use it you can set the option disableHI to true.
• Indicates the presence of sub-menus by automatically adding arrow images to relevant anchors. Arrows are fully customisable via CSS. You can turn off auto-generation of the arrow mark-up via the “autoArrows” option if required.
• drop shadows for capable browsers – degrades gracefully for Internet Explorer 6. Can disable shadows completely via options object.
• Can show the path to your current page while the menu is idle. The easiest way to understand this is to view the nav-bar example.
• Optional callback functions. The 'this' keyword within the handlers you attach will refer to the animated ul sub-menu. From version 1.4 there are now three other optional callbacks allowing for further enhancements and functionality to be added without needing to alter the core Superfish code.

ScrolTo

A very nice and useful plugin to scroll anywhere in your browser.