My Incomplete List of jQuery Plug-ins
What’s that famous line from the Rebel fighter pilot (or was it the Jedi youngling)? “There are… too many of them…” Yes, there are ‘too many’ jQuery Plug-ins—especially for an ex-YUI guy like me. So the crude filtering technique used to find the gems includes looking at “20 Amazing jQuery Plugins and 65 Excellent jQuery Resources,” “Your Favorite JQuery Controls & Plugins” and paging through the slightly redundant data set of the most popular plug-ins at plugins.jquery.com. Also, this list does not include the “official” jQuery UI plug-in. The table below summarizes (in some decreasing order of importance):
| [Validation Plugin](http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-validation/) | “…there are a lot of non-jQuery-based solutions (which you’d avoid since you found jQuery) and some jQuery-based solutions. This particular one [you are looking at](http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Validation) is one of the oldest jQuery plugins (started in July 2006) and proved itself in projects all around the world.” This one, by the way, is recognized in many “official” ways by Microsoft. |
| [Autocomplete Plugin](http://jquery.bassistance.de/autocomplete/) | “By giving an autocompleted field focus or entering something into it, the plugin starts searching for matching entries and displays a list of values to choose from. By entering more characters, the user can filter down the list to better matches.” |
| [Masked Input Plugin](http://digitalbush.com/projects/masked-input-plugin/) | “It allows a user to more easily enter fixed width input where you would like them to enter the data in a certain format (dates, phone numbers, etc).” |
| [Flexigrid](http://plugins.jquery.com/project/flexigrid) | “This is a lightweight but rich data grid with resizable columns and a scrolling data to match the headers, plus an ability to connect to an xml based data source using Ajax to load the content.” |
| [DirtyForm](http://plugins.jquery.com/project/dirtyform) | “This is a project for watching containers of inputs and notifying the user of unsaved changes.” |
| [TextLimiter](http://plugins.jquery.com/project/TextLimiter) | “Counts down the number of chars left on a Textarea/Input fields, won’t let the user write more than allowed number of characters.” Has more votes than [MaxChar](http://plugins.jquery.com/project/maxChar)… |
| [jQuery Tools](http://plugins.jquery.com/project/tools) | “This library contains six of the most useful JavaScript tools available for today’s website. The beauty of this library is that all of these tools can be used together, extended, configured and styled. In the end, you can have hundreds of different widgets and new personal ways of using the library.” |
| [jQuery Gallery Plugin](http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jquery-gallery-plugin) | “jQuery Gallery Plugin take a grouping of images and turn it into an flash-like image/photo gallery.” |
| [jstree](http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jstree) | “For many data-driven applications, high-quality grid and tree components are really important; kudos to Ivan for some interesting ideas in jsTree.”—[Ajaxian.com](http://ajaxian.com/archives/jstree-jquery-based-javascript-tree-component) |
| [useScript](http://plugins.jquery.com/project/useScript) | A more complex alternative to `$.getScript()`. |
| [YouTubePlaylist](http://plugins.jquery.com/project/YouTubePlaylist) | “A jQuery YouTube plugin that turns a list of youtube links into a complete YouTube gallery with thumbnails. Extremely easy to use and degrades gracefully.” Yes, there is a [YouTube JavaScript Player API](http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/js_api_reference.html) but this jQuery thing might be enough for me. |
| [Embed Quicktime](http://plugins.jquery.com/project/embedquicktime) (UI 1.2.x) | “Embed QuickTime is a jQuery plugin that helps you embed QuickTime movies to play directly on your webpage, instead of redirecting your video to a separate page or forcing you to embed a video using Flash. It changes regular image links to the embedded QuickTime video when they are clicked. It works with `.mov`, `.mp4` and `.m4v` files.” |
| [lwRTE](http://plugins.jquery.com/project/lwRTE) (UI 1.2.x) | “Do you need really lightweight and unbloated Rich Text Editor (RTE / WYSIWYG) for JQuery and ability to extend it as you want?” |
| [Editable](http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Editable) (UI 1.2.x) | “This is a real customizable jQuery editable plugin. Currently it can convert any tag (`span`, `div`, `p` and ...) to text input, password, `textarea`, drop-down list.”
“You can easily extend it by adding your own input type using its |