Getting to know jQuery's UI plugin

You can take a tour of the jQuery UI plugin by heading on over to http://www.jqueryui.com.

The UI plugin offers a set of standardized widgets, interactions, and effects. Let's take a look at each type of offering in detail.

Widgets

The term "widget" within jQuery is a bit different from a WordPress widget, which is a small plugin designed to sit nicely in a sidebar of a theme. Within jQuery's UI plugin, widgets describe a set of fully-featured, user interface controls that are commonly needed in projects and created by jQuery developers. The UI widgets save jQuery developers a lot of time writing jQuery statements and chaining functions together to create the same interface and effect. Here are the interface widget's jQuery UI offers:

• Accordion: This widget expands and collapses content that is broken into logical sections by clicking on the headers of each section. Only one section can be opened at any given time.

• Autocomplete (1.8+): This is a new feature...