«Return to Blog List 10 jQuery Plugins We Really, Really Like

It wasn’t that long ago that javascript was considered a “kiddie” programming language, used mostly to inflict annoying browser behavior on website visitors. Then, AJAX came along, using javascript to process client-side requests. Suddenly, javascript was useful. jQuery has been described as “javascript that has grown up.” Following are our current favorite plugins.

Thickbox – accommodates images (singly or in galleries), Flash, text, iframes, and AJAX, making it perhaps the most versatile of existing modal window scripts. Recently, there’s a Dreamweaver extension to further simplify implementation.

PrettyPhoto – another modal window that’s almost as versatile as Thickbox; we also like it because it’s so… pretty!

Watermark Input – unobtrusively allows hints in form fields that disappear when the user puts his cursor into the field.

jTabber – tabbed boxes that allow you to display hidden content on request, without reloading the page.

Superfish Menu – based on the suckerfish menu, this is a highly configurable menu system that supports IE6 and is accessible.

Scrollable HTML Table – like good little developers, we only use tables for displaying tabular data these days: this plugin allows you to fit a very long table into a short depth, scrolling it from top to bottom.

Colorize – another table plugin, this one for alternate coloring of rows and changing the color as you hover over each row.

jCarousel Lite – scrolls through images, highly configurable; we used this plugin for our portfolio presentation.

jqZoom – we haven’t had an opportunity to use this one yet, but it’s very cool; lets you “magnify” areas of an image.

s3Slider – another plugin we’re dying to use; maybe the coolest slide show effect ever.

Tags: Accessibility, CSS, Design/Development, jQuery