It is no secret that I am in love with jQuery. It sure has had an incredible impact on my work and after using a few other frameworks, I will never look back. As good as jQuery is, one of its major strengths is the fact that it has built in interfaces for creating addons and plugins.
Anyone who is developing for jQuery knows that there are a ton of jQuery plugins avalible - most of which can be found at the jQuery plugin repository. Browsing through that enormous list can give someone quite a headache. The truth is, there are o many plugins (some better than others) to do really anything you want so I have decided to make a small list of my favorite plugins.
This list is in no particular order because I feel that these plugins have all equally helped me through my development process.
The Cycle plugin is a wonderful set of animations that you can apply to your elements, typically being images but I am sure that you are creative enough to apply this technique to something else. I have only used it for photo galleries, but people love the effects it brings to the site.
How can anyone develop for Web 2.0 and not have some rounded corners in their page!? Rather than using a set of images and some tag soup in your markup, use this plugin to dynamically create said tag soup. It has its down sides; for example, it creates a certain amount of padding around the div due to all the extra div's that it adds in, but the good news is that in your actual XHTML markup, you need only to write a simple div element and nothing more. It works on other elements as well. The best part is that it creates beautifully anti-aliased corners.
This is one of my absolute favorites. The ThickBox is another variant of the ever popular Lightbox introduced long ago but with a twist. It allows you to "Lighbox" any content really. You can apply this technique to elements inside the page, dynamically created elements, images (both single and gallery sets), flash objects, videos, and most importantly to me - iFrame'd content. It really creates a new way of displaying all sorts of data to your visitor without causing them to leave the page.
jQuery has built in support for the Easing plugin. It works very simply - when you create a new animation or using an existing one (such as slideUp, slideDown, show, hide, etc) you can choose the easing method which will create a subtle but noticable change in the way the animation takes place. The best way to understand the power of this plugin is to see it in action at their example page.
hoverIntent is another one of my absolute favorites. It is such a simple idea, but allows for such creativity. This is the plugin that is the heart of the navigation menu here on Migliorisi.com as well as the side navigation on the Blog. jQuery has built in support for hover actions, but those actions happen immediately upon hovering over an element. Simply put, you can use this plugin to allow for a delay when you hover your mouse over something. It sounds simple, but can allow for some really cool effects.
TableSorter is a wonderful plugin that does exactly what the name says it does - it sorts tables. There is not much more to say about this plugin, but it does serve its purpose and it does it well. I use this quite often.
There are plenty more that I have used on various projects, but for the most part, these are the ones that I love and use over and over. They work great. I regularly use these as the basis of the plugins that I write. I would like to say Thankyou to everyone who has contributed to these plugins and I hope to see more in the future.
If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments!