jQuery UI sponsor Filament Group is holding an awesome contest:

“To celebrate ThemeRoller’s selection as a finalist for the SXSW Web Award for Technical Achievement, we’re holding a contest to give away one free pass to the SXSW Interactive Festival to the person who creates the coolest use of the new jQuery UI CSS framework.”

Check out the contest post here: Contest: Win a Free Pass to SXSW Interactive for the Coolest Use of the jQuery UI CSS Framework

Quoting Filament:

We’re really excited about the new jQuery UI CSS framework because it makes it easy to theme UI widgets or even entire layouts with the jQuery UI ThemeRoller web application. To celebrate the nomination and encourage everyone to take advantage of this new framework, we’re holding a contest to see who can demonstrate the most creative use of the framework’s capabilities. The winner will receive a free pass to the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, March 13-17, 2009.

How to get started

First off, download a theme and demo page from jQuery UI ThemeRoller and review the jQuery UI CSS framework documentation to get an idea of how the framework is used. Then head over to the jQuery UI site and grab the handy Firefox ThemeRoller bookmarklet to help you test your styles as you build your project. If you’re creating a demo page, we strongly suggest that you include the Theme switcher dropdown to let people quickly sample ThemeRoller themes on your page and really show off the theming in action.

Remember, the CSS framework is not just for jQuery plugins — framework styles can be used with any Javascript library or your own custom markup. We’d be thrilled to see how far you can go with a cool WordPress template, corporate website, widget or even a game to show the power and flexibility of this system. Feel free to use multiple scoped, themes, too — go wild.

How to enter

We’re going to keep this simple: post a comment with a brief description of your project and a link to a functioning example. The winner will be decided by Filament Group based on the creativity, quality and inventiveness of their project.

Contest rules

• Everyone is eligible, no exceptions.
• You may submit any type of project that uses the jQuery UI CSS framework: public sites, demo pages or anything else that shows off your creativity and is publicly accessible (read: not behind a login).
• You may enter as many unique projects as you wish; each will count as a separate entry. (Please don’t post the same one over and over…that may count against you).
• The entry deadline is Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at midnight.
• The contest winner will be announced on Friday, February 27, 2009.
• The winner will receive a single pass to the SXSW Interactive Festival, which includes admission to the SXSW Web Awards ceremony on Sunday, March 15. We will email you an access code that will allow your to register for free. (NOTE: the pass does not provide entry to the Film or Music festivals, nor does it include transportation, room/board, or meals — you’ll need to cover those yourself.)
• jQuery UI and Filament Group Inc. reserve the right to link to your project (we want to promote your hard work).

A little inspiration

To show off what is possible with the jQuery UI CSS framework, here is a really fantastic example of a plugin that uses the framework really well, from styles to icons. Nicolas Rudas created a very cool Apple-style file browser that also includes the theme switcher dropdown for good measure. He’s taken this a step further by creating a jQuery API browser that uses his plugin. Very cool indeed.

(NOTE: Nicolas Rudas was not notified prior to the announcement of this contest, so Nicolas, if you’d like to enter you’re still eligible to win. How’s that for competition?)

There is a list of plugins that use the CSS framework on the documentation wiki but it’s pretty short at the moment and we’re hoping that this contest really gets people fired up to try out the framework for themselves.

So…get to it, show us what you’ve got!

Check out the contest here: Contest: Win a Free Pass to SXSW Interactive for the Coolest Use of the jQuery UI CSS Framework

The jQuery UI team has been working for over 9 months on the 1.6 release and during this long process, we’ve deeply re-factored every plugin and introduced a very big shift in how we write markup and styles with the new jQuery UI CSS Framework. Also during that time, the jQuery core library released the new 1.3 version which incorporates a lot of improvements that we wanted to leverage.

We hear ya

We clearly have heard the confusion as these fairly large changes were made between release candidates in the 1.6 development cycle (post 1.6rc2). Based on feedback from the jQuery UI community, we want to address the confusion around compatibility between jQuery 1.2.6 and 1.3 and the jQuery UI library by creating two very distinct releases in the next few weeks:

1.6rc6 plus fixes will become 1.7 (compatible with jQuery 1.3+)

What we are currently calling jQuery UI 1.6rc6 is going to be released as jQuery UI 1.7. This code is built from the ground up to take full advantage of jQuery 1.3 and the new jQuery UI CSS Framework and is different enough to warrant a dot release. After a lot of analysis, we’ve decided that compatibility with both 1.2.6 and 1.3 is not feasible in a single UI release while still having a maintainable and lean codebase, so this version will not be compatible with jQuery 1.2.6 or earlier.

1.6rc2 plus fixes will become 1.6 (compatible with jQuery 1.2.6)

For all those folks still actively using jQuery 1.2.6, we want to provide a legacy release of the jQuery UI library based on 1.6rc2 that ports over as many bug fixes and improvements as possible from more recent code updates to provide a clear, stable foundation that will be fully compatible with jQuery 1.2.6. To avoid any confusion, this version will be called jQuery UI 1.6 final. Since this will be a legacy release, the team will not be actively developing this code once it is finalized. Also, this release will not contain any changes related to the new jQuery UI CSS Framework. It will have the same theming support as jQuery UI 1.5.3.

We understand that this is a fairly large change and welcome input from the community on how to make the upgrade as smooth as we possibly can. A complete upgrade guide will be posted shortly to guide you on a plugin-by-plugin basis to help ease the transition.

Current Release Status

We received a lot of great help testing the latest release candidate, 1.6rc6, and are fixing the final few issues, so that it can be released as soon as it’s ready. A current summary status of the release can always be found on the front page of our Dev and Planning wiki ( http://wiki.jqueryui.com/ ). We are very excited about the quality of this new jQuery UI release because it will serve as a solid foundation that will give us a stable API and let us release more frequently throughout the year with updates and new widgets.

Weekly releases coming

Starting in March we will switch to a weekly release mode. Each week we will alternate between pushing a stable bug fix release (1.7.1, 1.7.2, etc.) and a preview release (alpha, beta, rc) including new plugins and functionality. So each branch will receive an update at most every two weeks. If we need an additional release in-between or we need to add an extra beta or rc, we will do so on a week-to-week basis, adjusting the rest of the roadmap accordingly. Our goal is to work toward a 6-8 week release cycle (2-3 weeks alpha, 2-3 weeks beta, 1-2 weeks rc, then final).

Download builder update

We have pushed a complete update to the Download Builder. It is now fully integrated with ThemeRoller so that you can download a customized jQuery UI library zip including a pre-built or custom theme. We’ve also fixed up some issues that existed with downloading an invalid zip file in IE and also 1.5.3 minified files.

Thank you for your help and support

We want to thank the community for it’s support and encourage your participation in helping us to develop the best UI library on the planet. If you are a developer who is interested in helping us with bug fixing, please feel free to post a message on the ui-development group ( http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-ui-dev ) and ask how you can help out.