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.

A few days ago in a post titled Trigger Custom Events in jQuery, I demonstrated how to work with jQuery.bind() and jQuery.trigger() to create and execute custom events. This article will explore jQuery events a bit more by taking a look at namespaced events.

I can’t begin to count the number of times I have coded the same search field with the default value "Search…" in it and so that when the field receives focus, the text is cleared but magically reappears when the field blurs. Every time I code it I know I should save that snippet of code somewhere but it is always faster to just write it anew each time. Well, no more. I finally got around to writing jQuery plugin to allow me to add the focus/blur default value toggle to any field. I have very creatively named the plugin ‘Defaultify’.

I don’t know how, in the many years that I have been building web sites and using Ajax, I have never encountered a situation where I needed to return mixed HTML and executable JavaScript in an Ajax response. I routinely return JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) in Ajax responses as well as plain HTML but never both. Recently that changed.