StageForm (My First jQuery Plugin)
I love the JQuery javascript library just about as much as I do web development as a whole. The reason I feel that way is that it makes it so easy to improve an existing design through the addition of more contextual awareness to a web project by shielding developers from all the quirks of differing browser support for certain technologies. No small part of the reason why it has become so successful is the really robust plug-in architecture and ecosystem created around it by the community.
Some of you are probably thinking “Hang on! What even is a plug-in?” Without getting super-geeky, it is basically a way to do a lot of things to any jQuery object (thus being able to utilize functions and methods that already exist) whist keeping all the complex code for the single-track purpose that it serves out of the files where jQuery is being invoked. Maybe a better way to explain that is to use the example that, if you wanted to add AJAX validation to form elements and that required 200 lines of code, having that together with all other JS would be confusing in the future. However, if you were to invest a little more time during initial development writing that 200 lines with a plugin mindset, you could create a function that would fire off all the magic on a selected object (assuming that the plug-in is linked along with the library itself). In the file that you deal with on a day-to-day basis, this would turn those 200 lines for that function into a single one. Just in case you’re interested, it just so happens that that very example I just outlined (the first that came to mind) is actually a real plug-in.
Introducing Stageform
Admittedly, part of my motivation for creating jquery.stageform.js was that I’d never done it before and needed a purpose on which to base one. Having said that, the function that I decided on was splitting a form into stages in a semantic way and only showing one stage (elements collecting one type of data) at any time.
Getting More Information
The latest release, a working demo, feature requests and an outline of how to use all options offered by the plug-in are all available as part of the GitHub repository for this project.
Comment Posting Guidance
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With thanks, Tom