The Best jQuery Plugins of 2009

An article by Azad    No Comments

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 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.

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.