The Best jQuery Plugins of 2009
During the past few weeks we’ve been publishing our “Best of 2009″ series in which we’ve shown you the best WordPress themes, fonts, icons, and Photoshop Tutorials. In this article, our focus is on jQuery. Over the past couple of years jQuery has been growing in popularity, which means more and more plugins are being created to make web designers’ lives easier. Here are our favorites from 2009.
Content Sliders
This year we saw a growing popularity in using content sliders as a way to display several pieces of content within a limited area or to engage the user with the sliding animation. Normally this is done in a featured banner area near the top of the page. There were several jQuery plugins written in ’09 to accomplish this type of effect, but here are our favorites.
AnythingSlider
AnythingSlider is created by Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks and is a fully featured slider that is widely useful.
Easy Slider
Easy Slider is a content slider that gives you the the option to choose between classic previous/next navigation or to use a numeric “pagination” style navigation.
Coda-Slider 2.0
Coda-Slider 2.0 is aimed to mimic the slider effect on the promo page for Panic’s Coda software. The original version was hacked together in 2007, but this 2.0 version is built from the ground up.
Image Galleries
The days of having to use Flash to create image galleries with cross fading or sliding transitions are long gone. Thanks to jQuery these types of effects can be easily achieved with javascript. Here are our favorite image gallery plugins from this year.
Galleria
Galleria is a javascript image gallery written in jQuery. It loads the images one by one from an unordered list and displays thumbnails when each image is loaded. It will create thumbnails for you if you choose so, scaled or unscaled, centered and cropped inside a fixed thumbnail box defined by CSS.
jQuery Panel Gallery
jQuery Panel Gallery is a compact image gallery that can easily be configured. Not one image needs to be sliced or edited to work with this plugin. The plugin handles everything itself. You can even configure fading transitions per image.
slideViewer
slideViewer checks for the number of images within your list, and dynamically creates a set of links to command (slide) you pictures. Also, clicking on each image will make the gallery slide to the next picture.
Supersized
Supersized cycles images with transitions and preloading. It automatically resizes images to fill browser while maintaining image dimension ratio.
Navigation
I believe navigation is an aspect of a web site that should kept simple and easy to use. However, if there is a need to create a more engaging nav, jQuery is your best bet. Here are a few of the best from ’09.
jquery mb.menu
Horizontal Scroll Menu with jQuery
This isn’t a plugin, but I had to include it since it is such a cool effect. It’s a horizontal scroll menu that scrolls automatically according to your mouse axis-Y movement.
AutoSprites
Forms and Tables
Working with forms and tables is probably not the most glamorous part of web design and development, but it has to be done. There were several plugins released this year to help you spice things up a bit. Here are our favorites.
Password Strength
Password Strength tries to calculate how many possibilities the hacker needs to try to guess your password.
Ajax Fancy Capcha
Ajax Fancy Captcha is a jQuery plugin that helps you protect your web pages from bots and spammers. It introduces a new, intuitive way of completing “verify humanity” tasks.
Chromatable
Chromatable allows you to easily create scrolling tables with fixed headers.
jqTransform
jqTransform is a styling plugin which allows you to skin form elements.
Uploadify
Uploadify allows the easy integration of a multiple (or single) file uploads on your website.
jExpand
jExpand is ultra lightweight jQuery plugin that will make your tables expandable. Typical for line of business applications, this feature can help you organize tables better. This way, tables can hold more information such as images, lists, diagrams and other elements.
Related Posts
Here's some other articles that you will definitely find useful.
The Most Popular Articles of 2009
The Best Free Texture Packs of 2009
The Best Vector Tutorials of 2009
The Best Free WordPress Themes of 2009
The Best Photoshop Tutorials of 2009
28 comments
Ben
December 4, 2009Thanks for this great compilation. I really liked the “Chromtable” Plugin. I never heard about it before, its quite cool! Thanks man!
webmasterdubai
December 4, 2009jquery rocks i have used most of them plugins really rocking and good plugins.
Ales Bulva
December 4, 2009Very nice list. Always good to find best tools in one place. Thanks
MAXymeum Prod.
December 4, 2009Thanks but I think you forgot about my YMslider lol :
It is a simple dynamic, light-weight (2,1K minimified, lighter GZipped) and non-intrusive content slider jQuery plugin, fully CSS customizable (theme support) with respect of accessibility and W3C standard rules (strict xHTML valid).
Demo page : http://seb.maxymeum.free.fr/jQuery.YMslider/v105/
Google Code project page : http://code.google.com/p/ymslider/
designfollow
December 4, 2009great plugins
thank you
Chris Horton
December 4, 2009Awesome list, cheers for sharing
Bryan Watson
December 4, 2009A super-useful list. I’ve never seen the Ajax Fancy Capcha before, it’s great!
Jay Philips
December 4, 2009Great list, bookmarked for later so I can try all the plugins out.
Brandon Setter
December 4, 2009Nice list…. shared it with my fellow designers! All stuff I need to start using!
Jon
December 4, 2009Don’t forget QuickFlip 2: http://jonraasch.com/blog/quickflip-2-jquery-plugin
titos2k
December 4, 2009nice slider plugins. especially AnythingSlider. I’m thinking about using this one.
whether Fancy Captcha have other options than dragging heart and other ‘sweet symbols’? It’s not quite appropriate for business-type forms :\
Joanna
December 5, 2009Gotta love jQuery. I’ve used Galeria and Easy Slider and will not go back to any other scripting language if I can do it with jQuery. Super sweet list – thanks.
Alex Flueras
December 5, 2009Nice round-up. Thanks for sharing!
Waheed Akhtar
December 5, 2009Wow. Great collection.
Vijay
December 5, 2009Awesome. Sliders and gallery plugins are fantastic.
Thanks
EricB
December 5, 2009The jExpand demo does not work with IE 8, I kept clicking and it wouldn’t work. Finally I put IE 8 into 7 compat mode and it worked. Nice control, but needs updating.
Other than that, thanks a ton for the great article. The other controls are very nice.
Thank you!
-Eric
abdullah alaydrus
December 5, 2009two thumbs up, nice collection.
can be use for web project
Mark
December 5, 2009My 2009 jQuery work was a secure form, open-sourced from my site. It needs no SSL or client GPG, but yields vigorous, even “host-proof” security. It may interest someone. I’d like a proper jQuery plug-in made from it, but haven’t the time, myself.
Josh
December 5, 2009Great list. I personally love the AnythingSlider and Uploadify. I haven’t used either of them, but I have faith in the AnythingSlider, and I still have to checkout uploadify. Right now on my site I use the coda slider, but it looks like the anythingSlider is more what I’m looking for.
Jan
December 6, 2009For those who just want a fullscreen background image instead of a complete gallery Supersized offers, it may be worth to take a look at fullscreenr: http://nanotux.com/plugins/fullscreenr/index.html
Sangam Uprety
December 7, 2009Short and comprehensive list! I am stunned with the Uplodify, ajax file upload had never been that easier, both for developers and users!
Andre
December 8, 2009This is a great list of plugins. Just started using some of these on upcoming projects.
mupet
December 26, 2009Great list, i like uploadify
pier
December 29, 2009great list!
Gaston Robledo
February 3, 2010Here I let you a plugin that I made, It’s for crop, zoom, rotate and resize images in jQuery.
http://www.cropzoom.com.ar
Enjoy
Focus PRO
March 1, 2010This is a great list of plugins. Just started using some of these on upcoming projects.
FREEMAN
May 12, 2010Remember Likno Web Tooltips Builder for your list
http://www.likno.com/jquery-tooltips/index.php
Saradora
January 14, 2011This is a useful list of plugins…thanks