Writing Plugins
Prev Chapter 8. Plugins Next

Writing Plugins

Sometimes you want to make a piece of functionality available throughout your code; for example, perhaps you want a single method you can call on a jQuery selection that performs a series of operations on the selection. In this case, you may want to write a plugin.

Most plugins are simply methods created in the $.fn namespace. jQuery guarantees that a method called on a jQuery object will be able to access that jQuery object as this inside the method. In return, your plugin needs to guarantee that it returns the same object it received, unless explicitly documented otherwise.

Here is an example of a simple plugin:

Example 8.1. Creating a plugin to add and remove a class on hover

// defining the plugin
$.fn.hoverClass = function(c) {
    return this.hover(
        function() { $(this).toggleClass(c); }
    );
};

// using the plugin
$('li').hoverClass('hover');


Copyright Rebecca Murphey, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States license.


Prev Up Next
Chapter 8. Plugins Home Exercises