Your Favorite JQuery Controls & Plugins

Question

I'm still getting into JQuery. One of the most attractive elements is the plethora of available plug-ins and controls!

Of late, I've been a big fan of the Accordion. When styled and combined with some of the better animations it looks great. I've also just been introduced to the coda-slider, which also does an great job.

Help me learn! List your favorite JQuery controls and plug-ins!

Answer 1

Hands down the Dialog control for me. I've always hated popups and I hardly use them anymore.

Answer 2

I really like the Autocomplete plugin. I'm using it to replace dropdowns with lots of potential options and to provide a mechanism to prevent duplicate data insertion.

Answer 3

I love jGrowl. It really exemplifies unobtrusive JS for me :)

Answer 4

TableSorter

http://tablesorter.com/docs/

Answer 5

Check out asmselect! It makes it easier for users to select multiple items and know what was already selected and remove them if desired

If you are really interested in finding some more jquery plugins check this out.

Answer 6

jqGrid is simply the best and most flexible grid I have seen. It has, without a doubt, made my current project much easier. Ajax friendly, extendable, under active development. I can't find anything else that comes close.

Answer 7

Here is a good collection of jQuery plugins

Answer 8

This Context Menu plugin is a must have. It works great.

Answer 9

Here are two plugins that I frequently use (I'm biased because I wrote them).

• Timeago: Timeago is a jQuery plugin that makes it easy to support automatically updating fuzzy timestamps (e.g. "4 minutes ago" or "about 1 day ago").
• Flexselect: Flexselect is a jQuery plugin that turns select boxes into flex-matching incremental-finding controls. Think of it as Quicksilver squished into a select box.

Here are some other's that I really like and use quite frequently:

• Facebox: Facebox is a jQuery-based, Facebook-style lightbox which can display images, divs, or entire remote pages. It's simple to use and easy on the eyes.
• jGrowl: jGrowl is a jQuery plugin that raises unobtrusive messages within the browser, similar to the way that OS X's Growl Framework works.
• Form Example: This is a jQuery plugin to populate form inputs with example text that disappears on focus.
• Live Query: Live Query utilizes the power of jQuery selectors by binding events or firing callbacks for matched elements auto-magically, even after the page has been loaded and the DOM updated.
• Form: The jQuery Form Plugin allows you to easily and unobtrusively upgrade HTML forms to use AJAX.

Answer 10

Flexigrid is a terrific grid plugin.

Answer 11

I am a big fan of BeautyTips

Answer 12

I use DatePicker on all my input fields that should contain dates. It looks very sharp. I did modify it a bit to fix a bug with reading back from the input. Beyond that it works very well.

Flot is another plugin I've taken to using more (and I think SO uses it too on the user rep page). It's a graphing plugin that supports all kinds of data sets, very useful for showing statistics visually.

Levitip is useful for hover boxes, I use it a lot within forms to give more details about a field.

Lasty Facebox replaces any need for pop-up windows anymore.

Answer 13

uiToaster is pretty cool, and the whole jqueryUI suite

Answer 14

hoverIntent. It's basically a replacement for mouseover/mouseout. It waits until your mouse slows down before it fires the events so you don't accidentally fire off ajax calls inside of a mouseover.

I made a blog post about how I'm using it.

Answer 15

I am using flot, a charting and plotting library. I'm using it in many projects now and it's fast, stable and the produced charts are quite good looking.

I have embedded cluetip in a .NET web control and I am using extensively on many projects.

Answer 16

I really like the jQuery tools from flowplayer. The default look and feel is quite nice.

Answer 17

I like the jquery validation plugin.