Learning jQuery - Fourth Edition

Chapter 8. Developing Plugins

The available third-party plugins provide a bevy of options for enhancing our coding experience, but sometimes we need to reach a bit farther. When we write code that could be reused by others or even just ourselves, we may want to package it up as a new plugin. Fortunately, the process of developing a plugin is not much more involved than writing the code that uses it.

In this chapter, we will cover:

• Adding new global functions within the jQuery namespace
• Adding jQuery object methods that allow us to act on DOM elements
• Creating sophisticated plugins using the jQuery UI widget factory
• Distributing completed plugins to the world

Using the dollar ($) alias in plugins

When we write jQuery plugins, we of course must assume ...