Friday 16 July 2010

jQuery: the magic wand

   


I don't like CMSs. Well, I must admit: I really hate CMSs. I'm stating that just because I do like programming my own web site with complete freedom. And CMSs - even if they claim to be complete or complicated - are usually too tight for my needs.
Even though that is always true and I won't change my mind in the future, I do believe that sometimes programming everything in a web site is very hard and time consuming. So a little help - with complete freedom and customization - is welcome.

jQuery has nothing to do with CMSs
- obviously - and I bet many of you already know this little-big-wonderful piece of work. jQuery is a JavaScripty library that helps web site programmer to create enhanced documents presentation. It actually opens a new world in content handling and it is quite difficult to explain in details all the features you might find useful (if you need more info please visit jQuery).

I used jQuery in different situation, but surely one way to get started with it is to visit the plug-in page (jQuery Plug-In) or the incredible UI page (jQuery UI).

One of the plug-in I recently used is the round corner one. Actually there are many round-corners plug-in: sometimes they work with exCanvas (for IE compatibility), sometimes they don't. I recently found a good one (which is perfectly working in FF and IE) called jQuery Corner (http://jquery.malsup.com/corner/). If you look at the demo site you will understand how many possibilities you have at hand and I assure you, your web site design will surely get more attractive to users with the use of it.

Another good place I found is an article called "25+ Highly Useful jQuery Plugins Bringing Life back to HTML Tables" (http://www.afiffattouh.com/web-design/25-highly-useful-jquery-plugins-bringing-life-back-to-html-tables). As my applications always present data in a tabular way, I really found those tips useful. (16/09/2010: the link disappeared just a few days ago... sorry!)


Frankly you can just throw "jQuery" into Google and thousands of site will come out as result. Every time I have a problem and get stuck with lack of ideas, I always try and see if jQuery can help me someway and most the times it does!

In the end I invite you to give jQuery a try. It is worthwhile.

Oh... by the way, this post actually wrap up my first week as blogger. Wow! Not many hits (actually I would say almost no hits), but that's life and I still enjoy it.

0 thoughts:

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated. I apologize if I don't publish comments immediately.

However, I do answer to all the comments.