What are the "must have" jQuery plugins?

I'd like to know what are the most useful JQuery plugins. I'm particularly interested in those which are likely to be useful in general UI development, such as Tablesorter, rather than those which serve uncommon needs.

If you could provide a very brief description of the plugin's purpose, that would be really helpful.

Thanks, Don

My list:

• Autocomplete
  • Input field to enable users quickly finding and selecting some value, leveraging searching and filtering.
• JSON
  • JSON plugin retrieving retrieving and manipulating json data.
• Cookie
  • Simple & lightweight utility plugin for reading, writing and deleting cookies.
• Vaildation
  • For validating form input data.
• UI
  • Full-featured themable and ready-to-use widgets and more...
• Interface
  • Dragging, Sortables, Droppables, plug-and-play components and visual effects.
• Cycle
  • Versatile and lightweight image slideshow plugin.

We currently use:

Most impressive

• Layout (dock, pin, splitter) - just amazing

Jquery UI elements:

• Tabs - tabbed UI
• AutoComplete - suggestion box from web service
• DatePicker - nice calendar date picker

Useful community plugins:

• Scrollable - scrolls any div
• Scrollpane - control scrollbar appearance
• Table sorter - table sorting (client-side) for any simple table
• QuickSearch - instant searching of table content
• Validate - form validation (required / type / custom regEx)
• HotKeys - traps for key shortcuts. Captures EVERY key on the keyboard. Awesome.
• BlockUI - awesome modal dialogs
• Curvy Corners - anti-aliased by default
• Tokenised input (or Facebook autocomplete with Xs) - Facebook style tokenised autocomplete

More to come, I'll add links etc...

I think that Flot plugin (a plotting library / plugin) deserves a place in this "must-have" list.

In addition, it is used here, in StackOverflow, to display the histogram of the reputation in the user account page.

I'll list one I'm working on...

My jLINQ plugin is a jQuery version of .NET LINQ. It's made for working with in-memory collections (not talking directly to the server) and let's you use syntax similar to the following.

var results = $.from(data)
    .ignoreCase()
    .startsWith("firstName","m")
    .or("n")
    .isNot("administrator")
    .orderBy("lastName")
    .select();

It supports a bunch of other commands that you find in LINQ for ordering and grouping along with most of the selection commands like contains, between, greaterThan, etc...

Here is a demo - It's stable, but still in progress

Maybe not must have, but might be useful as it progresses...

I just found jqGrid and it looks very good.

and it also has lots of documentation (right now a 99 pages pdf) and examples

• jQuery UI
  • For Tabs, sortable lists, custom animations, drag and drop, etc.
• AJAX Form (<http://malsup.com/jquery/form/>;)
  • Changes your forms so they submit an AJAX request.
• Cycle (<http://malsup.com/jquery/cycle/>;)
  • For creating carousels, or an area which cycles through an array of data (images, text, etc)
• Validation (<http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-validation/>;)
  • For validating form input.

For an unobtrusive way to send messages to the client without affecting the page's content permanently, I use jGrowl, based on the OSX Growl system.

Lot's of options, settings, and it keeps the page clean : )

jQuery tools from Flowplayer is really fancy. I really like the expose and overlay plugin.

I know this is an old post but, just thought I would throw my 2 cents in, for future reference.

Colorbox - Definitely the best modal window/lightbox for Jquery.

The Validation plugin (previously mentioned) also works very well.

UI - no better way to do draggables, resizables and few others.

Slibox2 - ultimate lightbox clone for jQuery, very easy to use.

iFixPng - simple solution for IE6 PNG w/alpha.

I have been very impressed with the Filament Group's Date Range Picker

UI is definitely a must-have. As a grid component, I would recommend jqGrid. IMHO, it is better than flexiGrid.

I always use Facebox to display pop-up forms and messages to the user. It keeps the UI clean (most of our users use Facebook), and yet it's not as bland as using alert().

If you're using Visual Studio 2008 to code your jQuery you need the Intellisense: http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2008/10/27/jquery-intellisense-documentation-file-available.aspx

http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/dimensions , it has great offset and outerwith functions...

[edit] - Recently I've been using JQuery Tools as an alternative to JQueryUI, JQuery Tools is more HTML5/CSS3 centric: http://flowplayer.org/tools/index.html

I like JCarousel Lite (not JCarousel) http://www.gmarwaha.com/jquery/jcarousellite/ does just what I need and nothing more.

-fs

No one has mentioned these, which I found very usefull:

• Datatables - Add advanced functions and interaction controls to a HTML table
• BeautyTips - Add configurable tooltips to a HTML element

I'm a big fan of jTemplates, which gives you client side templating. I find it extremely powerful, especially for rendering results.

• Jqgrid: http://www.trirand.com/blog ,Best grid plug-in available for jQuery
• pngFix: http://jquery.andreaseberhard.de/pngFix ,fixing problems with alpha transparent PNG images in IE