jQuery is great in many ways. You probably first heard about the framework when browsing through a showcase of beautiful “ajax” scripts and became impressed with how easy it can be used to create advanced and delightful effects. But jQuery is much more than that. After you’ve seen all the fancy slides and animations and got to know the framework, you realize that it can do much more to assist you in building advanced, content-driven web sites and applications.

Here is a hand-picked list of useful jQuery scripts and utilities, created to make your web development easier. You won’t find any fancy slides or animations in here, instead I have compiled a list of the best, most well-written and useful jQuery components on the web that I would use myself.

Am I missing something? Let me know in the comments.

Google Analytics Integration for jQuery

This plugin is intended to simplify the process of adding Google Analytics tracking to a page, including the tracking of outbound links, mailtos, and downloads, which are not otherwise tracked by default.

Masked Input Plugin

This is a masked input plugin for the jQuery javascript library. It allows a user to more easily enter fixed width input where you would like them to enter the data in a certain format (dates,phone numbers, etc).

Switch stylesheets with jQuery

The stylesheet switcher allows your visitors to choose which stylesheet they would like to view your site with. It uses cookies so that when they return to the site or visit a different page they still get their chosen stylesheet.

jQuery.ScrollTo

With this plugin, you will easily scroll overflowed elements, and the screen itself. It gives you access to many different options to customize and various ways to specify where to scroll.

Terracoder

xmlObjectifier is here to help. In just one method call your XML document is converted into a JavaScript Object and is ready for simple data browsing using a familiar dot notation. xmlObjectifier is written in client-side JavaScript in an object oriented manner to reduce processing overhead and to provide optimal compatibility across various browsers.

jQuery AlphaNumeric

jQuery AlphaNumeric is a javascript control plugin that allows you to limit what characters a user can enter on textboxes or textareas.

jQuery BlockUI Plugin

The jQuery BlockUI Plugin lets you simulate synchronous behavior when using AJAX, without locking the browser. When activated, it will prevent user activity with the page (or part of the page) until it is deactivated. BlockUI adds elements to the DOM to give it both the appearance and behavior of blocking user interaction.

Chili

Chili is the jQuery code highlighter plugin, featuring very fast highlightning, trivial setup, fully customizable, thoroughly documented, MIT licensed and much more.

Form

The jQuery Form Plugin allows you to easily and unobtrusively upgrade HTML forms to use AJAX. The main methods, ajaxForm and ajaxSubmit, gather information from the form element to determine how to manage the submit process. Both of these methods support numerous options which allows you to have full control over how the data is submitted.

JQuery Media Plugin

The jQuery Media Plugin supports unobtrusive conversion of standard markup into rich media content. It can be used to embed virtually any media type, including Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media Player, Real Player, MP3, Silverlight, PDF and more, into a web page. The plugin converts an element (usually an <a>) into a <div> which holds the object, embed or iframe tags neccessary to render the media content.

jQuery Taconite Plugin

The jQuery Taconite Plugin allows you to easily make multiple DOM updates using the results of a single AJAX call. It processes an XML command document that contain instructions for updating the DOM.

jFeed

A lightweight JavaScript feed parser based on jQuery.

jScrollPane

jScrollPane is a jquery plugin which allows you to replace the browsers default vertical scrollbars on any block level element with an overflow:auto style. You can easily control the apperance of the custom scrollbars using simple CSS.

Mouse Wheel Extension

Adds mouse wheel support for your application! Just call mousewheel to add the event and call unmousewheel to remove the event.

jQuery Dimensions Plugin

The dimensions plugin extends jQuery with dimension centric methods. It has been rigorously tested and gives accurate results cross-browser. Methods like width and height are extended by dimensions to enable you to get the width and height of both the window and the document. Methods like offset and position help you find the coordinates of an element on your page.

Livequery

Live Query utilizes the power of jQuery selectors by binding events or firing callbacks for matched elements auto-magically, even after the page has been loaded and the DOM updated.

jQuery Easing Plugin

A jQuery plugin to give advanced easing options.

Cookie

A simple, lightweight utility plugin for reading, writing and deleting cookies.

JavaScript text higlighting jQuery plugin

jCache - A client-side caching plugin for jQuery

to improve web apps performance, you make calls to the server to get data and cache them on the server. This is of course effective, but sometimes not enough, since the browser must wait for the response from server none the less.

jMaps Framework Documentation

The jMaps Framework is a jQuery plugin that provide a easy to use and powerful API for creating dynamic Google Maps.

History plugin

This plugin helps you make your Ajax-driven page available for “Go Back” button and “bookmark” of browser.