With a quite promising slogan “Write Less, Do More,” jQuery has become the first choice among web developers, and is probably one of the most popular JavaScript libraries. It is not surprising since it fully justifies the motto and has an enormous potential that can be easily unlocked by any tech-savvy person. Here are a few free jQuery plugins that are considered to be the most popular, the most sought-after and the most effective.
There are tons of fast, versatile and feature-rich solutions that are powered by it on the wild. High value plugins are are universal, and can bring benefits to different projects and layouts. As a rule, we seek code snippets that were neatly and professionally converted into plugins that have documentation and intuitive manual.
These tiny and lightweight enhancements refine projects in terms of design, interactivity, user experience, readability and other significant and integral aspects.
List of Free jQuery Plugins
Datedropper
Datedropper is a lightweight jQuery plugin for working with dates that populate forms. It presupposes settings for customizing color, animation effect, language, format, background, border color and some others. The official website includes demos and all the necessary documentation.
PhotoSwipe
With two traditional gallery styles, full and minimal, PhotoSwipe is aimed to showcase a series of images in the best possible light. It is a perfect match for modern responsive websites that should provide an optimal experience for different devices. The plugin supports all standard touch gestures. The navigation is also available through keyboard and intuitive interface with pixel-perfect graphics
Chartist
Chartist turns the display of boring statistics into a captivating, engaging and visually interesting spectacle. This small, responsive SVG-based library lets build vibrant and dynamic charts. The only drawback is that the plugin is supported by modern browsers such as IE9 and higher, Safari 7, Android 4.3, Firefox 3.1, Chrome 3.5.
Animsition
The main goal of Animsition is to enhance the user experience by making the transition between pages a pleasant event. This tiny jQuery plugin allows creating smooth and eye-pleasing CSS-powered animations that accompany shifting. It offers almost 60 different effects including standard fade series, fade-up series, fade-down series, rotate series, flip x/y, zoom series and overlay.
FSVS
FSVS, or Full Screen Vertical Scroll, enables you to deal with scrolling effects more efficiently and productively. It leverages CSS3 transition effects and has an optional yet vital jQuery fallback. Since it should provide an extra functionality for small devices such as tablets and cellphones, it supports touch gestures and swipes. What’s more, you can also use arrow keys, mouse wheel, click and drag.
Strip
Strip is a modern solution to add an elegant lightbox to your website. It is smooth, sleek and smart. Since it takes up not the whole browser screen, users are left with free space and some other parts of the layout for better and less intrusive interaction. Moreover, it is driven by jQuery, so that all the modern browsers handle it.
Sweet Alert
Sweet Alert enriches regular and dull pop-up windows that appear when something wrong happens or when you require some interaction from the visitors. The plugin automatically centers an alert box and provides a semi-transparent dark overlay accompanying screen thereby easily focusing the whole attention on the content. It is highly customizable in terms of design and complementary effects.
Midnight
Midnight offers a simple yet viable solution for improving and enhancing fixed top bars that, as a rule, are used as primary navigation centers or advertisement/info panels in long or parallax-based websites. It lets switch between several variants while the user is moving down.
Block Scroll
Block Scroll was created to improve readability and user experience. Content heavy and information overloaded projects will feel the whole potential of this product. It breaks the page into digestible portions that are displayed one at a time, giving readers freedom and time to enjoy data.
Paper Collapse
Paper Collapse is a regular accordion that has a beautiful, sleek appearance and a handful of features. Being inspired by Google’s Material Design, the component employs Font Awesome icons to make the interface look more intuitive and more harmonious and stylish.
FocusPoint
FocusPoint offers simple yet useful instruments for cropping of flexible image containers, making this process more intelligent and hassle-free. It is well-suited for full-screen images. It easily deals with different dimensions and two modes, such as portrait and landscape, in order to maintain consistency in style and provide better experience on smaller devices.
TextTailor
TextTailor is intended to work with text more efficiently. The plugin makes the content to be more responsive and mobile-friendly. Its primary function is to force the text to fill the height of the container thereby contributing to the general formatting and design aesthetics.
BootGrid
BootGrid is a small and powerful enhancement for Bootstrap-driven websites. It has an intuitive interface that improves work with one of the basic components. It easily transforms a primitive table into refined data table with extra controls and options.
PrettyEmbed
PrettyEmbed allows populating projects with YouTube-hosted videos without delays and problems. It comes with such features as fetch the preview image that won’t look distorted on a huge or vice versa small screens, extra customization options, and native support for FitVids.
Waves
Waves was also inspired by the Google Material Design concept. It offers a tiny accompanying effect that enriches clicking. You can apply it to buttons, icons, DIVs and images. What’s more, it perfectly works with event handlers inherent to jQuery and JavaScript.
jsPDF
jsPDF is HTML5-based client-side solution for dynamically generating PDF files. The library is quite powerful in what it can do so that in order to feel its enormous potential you should visit the official website. It ships with numerous built-in functions and uses jQuery. As for browser compatibility, it works well in Firefox 3+, Chrome, Safari 3+, Opera and even IE 6 (with some tricks).
fontFlex
fontFlex is aimed to make the primary font of the website responsive and fully adaptive. The extension dynamically selects the right size that should make the content look more appropriate within a container or browser screen, improving readability.
Vide
Video backgrounds made easy with this super lightweight and smart plugin. Vide helps to enrich the website with lavish and dynamic visuals. It is supported by the latest browser versions; with one exception, as usual, IE8 and lower are left behind. Some versions of Android and iOS can also experience problems. For the rest, everything is fine.
Trianglify
Trianglify is all about fascinating, eye-catching and stylish polygonal art that beautifies an appearance of any website giving the backdrop a cutting-edge feel. The online tool automatically generates the vibrant and geometric style SVG background images that are constructed from triangles. You can specify the amount of objects, their size, color and even set the output format.
TitleNotifier
TitleNotifier is a miniature dependency-free JavaScript library with a set of instruments for thorough customization. It shows the number of unread notifications in your web page title, just as Gmail does it when it comes to unopened messages.
jBox
jBox is a small yet powerful and advanced plugin that deals with pop-up windows, tool tips, notices and images. Each one has its series of assigned effects that contribute to general aesthetics and user experience. It meets standards for retina screens and works great, even in IE8.
CrossFade
CrossFade is a minified jQuery plugin that weighs only 3kb. It is an excellent enhancement for long-page websites where images play the first fiddle. It preloads images as to not annoy users with a boring loading process.
Scrolling Progress
Scrolling Progress provides your online visitors with visual indicator while they are moving down and exploring your long-page website. Designed with the help of HTML and CSS and charged with extra dynamic feel by jQuery, this framed code snippet can contribute to general experience and benefit any project.
tableExport
tableExport works with various sorts of tables. You can export HTML table into such popular file formats as JSON, XML, PNG, CSV, TXT, SQL, MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint and even PDFs in several clicks.
Scroll Up Bar
Scroll Up Bar is particularly useful for mobile and tablet user interfaces that are suffering from a lack of free space. The plugin hides the navigation bar that as a rule sits on the top when the user starts to scroll down and shows it when a user is ready to go up thereby providing an extra space and not distracting from the design.
CoverVid
CoverVid is another viable and efficient solution to work videos into a project and set them as a basic background. It cooperates mainly with HTML5 videos. There are several settings that allow getting the most out of it.
Conclusion
When it comes to enhancements and improvements, it is hard to find something better than a pack of tried-and-true and approved by dev community jQuery plugins. They are proved to be the most viable, easy, cost-effective and time-saving solutions.
You can solve a bunch of common problems with the help of them, starting from making more eye-catching calls to action to enriching user experience in long-page websites with extra informative indicators or captivating effects. Some of them have a great informative background, others should be perceived on an intuitive level, yet all of them deserve your attention.
