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» jQuery Part 4: AJAX Effects

You can do a lot of AJAX things within jQuery as well. There is a long list of AJAX plugins (77 at the moment of writing) that ranges in useability. This means that anytime you need to have any AJAX effect on your site, you can just use a jQuery plugin and save yourself a bunch of code, making your page a lot lighter and faster to render. Below are some effects that I think is both pretty useful and pretty cool.

AJAX Content

This plugin lets you quickly create an AJAX based page with page functionality. You have the option of displaying a loading message and more and of course what you want to load and where you want to load it. You can also customize the error message visible. Read More »

jTemplates

This jQuery plugin create a 100% javascript based template system. It gives you the normal template features of variables in a nice javascript, lightweight way. Read More »

Currency Conversion

Get a real time currency converter added onto your site with this simple but very useful plugin, allowing you through AJAX to convert the currency to a more convenient one. Read More »

• There are of course a ton more plugins available for jQuery that utilizes AJAX and there are just a teaser sample.

» jQuery Part 3: Introduction Screencasts

So, you’ve taken a liking to jQuery by now and are looking to dive in and do some coding of your own. Well, here are two good Intro videos to how to write jQuery code from Chris Coyier from CSS-Tricks. It touches base on how to do the base coding that you’ll need to understand and master before moving onto more advanced code. So all I’m going to do today in the jQuery series is send you to watch those videos and learn a little bit about jQuery coding before we more through with some more plugins!

• Intro to jQuery Part 1
• Intro to jQuery Part 2

» jQuery Part 2: Why use it?

I got quite a few questions about why you want to use jQuery after the article I ran yesterday about the editease plugin for jQuery. I thought I should address those here in part two and explain why you’d want to use it.

Recapping, what is jQuery?

jQuery is a javascript framework that allows you to develop plugins with, essentially cool and useful effects. Naturally you can just download any of the vast amount of plugins that are available and use on your site, which brings us to another advantage. A lot of the code don’t need to be rewritten again and again in the scripts, because that’s in the framwork. So in essence, it’s a great way to style up your site using javascript effects.

Why should I use it then?

Well as I’ve said, it does allow you to add creative effects through javascript but not only creative and good looking effects. You can also add useful boxes, form validations, site editing (like I talked about yesterday), really simply through the plugins of a framework. If you’re a developer you can of course write your own functions much simpler than it would be if you were to write everything from dead scratch. This is something every user benefits from in the case that you don’t need to load a ton of scripts onto a website that are writing the same base code all over, which brings us onto another important thing. The whole framework itself is really lightweight.You are not really adding a lot of page weight with the framework.

Another big pro of using a popular framework is the wide range of plugins available. jQuery is a very big framework and has a super plugin repositry, where you can find a whole whole lot. If you are looking for AJAX effects, you’ll find it. If you happen to be looking at basic content management, you’ll find that too.

Now, there are other javascript frameworks out there such as Prototype and Mootools. It’s a lot of a personal thing. I’m a jQuery guy and I like how it’s built and therefore I use it.

» jQuery Part 1: Content management

jQuery is a very good and stabile javascript framework that has loads of plugins available which will do everything between heaven and earth. I’ve decided to be running an article series about it for just that reason. When checking the repositry for plugins out a bit yesterday I found some really cool jQuery scripts and one was a clever one to do with content management.

Granted though it isn’t a dabatase solution and neither is it meant for very large scale sites but for smaller sites that just need to update the content online, this script will work wonders. It’s called EditEase and is a free download. Being built on the jQuery javascript framework, that and Thickbox is really all you need to have included for this to work. There is also a multiple file uploader available in the script with the need for SWFupload script.

What EaseEdit will let you do is define areas of certain pages of your site that are editable using the script online. The editing interface is really slick and all is really stylish and easy to use. It’s even got the FCKEditor embedded in the full edit screen!

Go and check out the demo of the script and play around with it and I think you’ll find that you’re going to like it quite a bit.