Ten Totally Awesome jQuery Plugins

Linc Wonham — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:00:00 GMT

December has finally arrived, which means that the Web will be flooded with end-of-the-year lists for the next thirty days. For our part, we decided to kick off the celebration with the following compilation of some of WM's favorite jQuery plugins that either made their debuts or underwent significant updates in 2011.

If jump-starting your designs or just simplifying the development process are on your list of resolutions for 2012, take a look at these jQuery plugins from the past year:

jRumble
Released in October 2011, jRumble gets viewers’ attention by adding a vibrating – or rumbling – effect to any element on a page. It can be used as an effective hover tool or will merely make certain elements of your design stand out.

Simple Overlay
Users can add lightweight, flexible overlays to the entire page or confine them to a single element, and display the overlays using jQuery’s fade effect, slide effect or no effect at all.

FlexSlider (image below)
Released over the summer, FlexSlider is a responsive jQuery slider designed to serve beginning designers/developers as well as providing the more seasoned professionals with a tool they can use with confidence.

My QR Code (image below)
Generate QR codes for mobile devices using the Google Chart API, and the plugin will generate the codes for the URLs of each page. Users can also specify the text, encoding and size of their QR codes.

NivoSlider
Version 2.7 of this image slider was released in November with an added random-start setting, a new flashing caption feature and a data-transition attribute that allows users to set custom transitions per slide.

Reveal
Reveal is a lightweight (1.75KB) modal window solution that has become popular for its style and movement. The plugin is cross-browser compatible with modern browsers and allows users to set up modals in three simple steps.

FitText
Achieve scalable headlines, titles and other large-display text with this plugin that makes font sizes flexible. Users can implement FitText in their fluid or responsive layouts to help fill the width of the most prominent elements.

Isotope
A wonderful tool for creating smart designs, Isotope allows users to hide and reveal item elements and re-order item elements without sorting. The plugin’s animation engine takes advantage of the best browser features when available but will also fall back to JavaScript animation for lesser browsers.

Ajax PayPal Cart
Released in April, this new plugin allows developers to add an AJAX-powered PayPal shopping cart to their sites, and no refresh is required when updating the cart.

Supersized (image below)
Supersized is a full-screen background slideshow that’s been built using the jQuery library, and the latest version of the popular plugin was released just this week with an array of new examples to serve as foundations for your next project.

'Net Features : jQuery plugins, web design

Ten Totally Awesome jQuery Plugins