I apologize in advance for the length of this article and the sometimes meandering path it takes. I found this was not only a difficult article to write, and list of skills to compile, but also a difficult article to organize. I hope you find it useful.

While working on a project for work today, I encountered a problem that I apparently have never encountered before. What I thought was a very simple function call in jQuery turned out to be a bit more complicated. I needed to removed an HTML element from a string representation of an HTML snippet. jQuery doesn’t quite behave the way I expected and I had trouble finding a solution.

Things have come a long way since the early days of the web and standard JavaScript window.onload and element.onclick event handling. Even using JavaScript on your web page was risky business in the early days because the availability and acceptance of JavaScript was so unpredictable.

In this article, I will teach you how to develop a standard jQuery plugin. I will keep things as simple as possible and will only build a very trivial plugin, but through this example I will cover all of the important aspects of jQuery plugin development.

A couple of years ago, while integrating the WYMeditor Semantic HTML editor into SkyBlueCanvas lightweight CMS, I experimented with different ways to simplify adding custom buttons and fuctionality to WYMeditor.