Chapter 7. Using Plugins

Throughout the first six chapters of the book, we have examined jQuery's core components. Doing this has illustrated many of the ways in which the jQuery library can be used to accomplish a wide variety of tasks. Yet as powerful as the library is at its core, its elegant plugin architecture has allowed developers to extend jQuery, making it an even more feature-rich library.

The growing jQuery community has created hundreds of plugins—from small selector helpers to full-scale user-interface widgets. In this chapter, we'll look at what a plugin is, how to find plugins developed by others, and how to incorporate them into our web pages. Then, in the following chapter, we'll explore how to create our own contributions to the jQuery plugin ecosystem.