Things have come a long way since the early days of the web and standard JavaScript window.onload and element.onclick event handling. Even using JavaScript on your web page was risky business in the early days because the availability and acceptance of JavaScript was so unpredictable.

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’.