Today I’m proud to announce the official opening of the jQuery Learning Center, a community-driven site dedicated to helping people learn about jQuery, JavaScript and front-end development. The goal is to provide a resource that can fill in the gaps that necessarily exist between reading about APIs and actually understanding how to use jQuery effectively. We know a lot of people scour the web each day for this type of information, and we hope the Learning Center can serve as a dependable place for our users to turn.

The Learning Center will continue to evolve, but it would not be what it is today without Rebecca Murphey’s jQuery Fundamentals, which she donated to the jQuery Foundation to form its original nucleus. (Thanks Rebecca!) For this initial launch, we’ve worked to supplement this with information about jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile, features that have been added to jQuery in the interim, and other blog posts and articles from other authors. We’ve also ported over most of what remained on docs.jquery.com, as the Learning Center is indeed intended to be its replacement: documentation that anyone can use — and edit!

There are lots of folks in the jQuery community who like to share their knowledge with others and spend a lot of time writing articles and giving advice, hoping only that it helps someone else understand how to make a decision or get out of a jam. The jQuery Learning Center is for you too. We hope that it will empower those of you who already do this (and those who haven’t — yet) to reach the right audience: the people looking for it! The Learning Center is the latest in the jQuery Foundation’s series of open content sites, so all of the articles are written in Markdown and the entire site is open source. Whether you’ve got a new article you’d like to get published or just notice a typo, the Learning Center is certainly one area of jQuery that’s open to all sorts of new feature requests!

You can find out more about the jQuery Learning Center, and if you’re interested in helping out, you should definitely take a look at our Contributing Guide. We’ll continually seek to flesh out the subject matter on the site, so whether you’ve already got a great idea, an old StackOverflow answer that you always thought “should be in the docs,” or want to take a look at the existing issues for inspiration, there’s sure to be something you can dig into!

We hope the new Learning Center will be a useful new reference for users and authors alike, and welcome your feedback. You can get in touch with us by filing issues, joining us in the #jquery-content IRC channel on freenode, or send an e-mail to content at jquery dot com.

They say good things come to those who wait, and today we’re happy to end the waiting and unveil the jQuery Plugin Registry. We’ve worked long and hard to put together a brand new site that will serve to reduce the fragmentation and distribution problems that can be obstacles for plugin developers and consumers. We’ve also put an emphasis on remedying a number of the issues that plagued the old jQuery plugins site, especially with respect to workflows for contribution of both plugins and enhancements to the repository itself. The goal is to make sharing and browsing quality jQuery plugins a pleasant experience for everyone!

jQuery Plugin Registry: plugins.jquery.com
Source/Documentation/Issues: github.com/jquery/plugins.jquery.com

Downloading and Using Plugins

If you’re looking to just browse and use jQuery plugins in your application or site, not a lot has changed. Plugins each have basic pages that provide a link to the plugin download, as well as past versions, documentation, issue tracker, and source code repository. Download links may serve you a zip file with the plugin assets, or link to the best resource to download the build of the plugin you’re looking for.

Registering Your Plugin

Registering your plugin and having it listed on the site is not a complicated process; however, it assumes a number of aspects of the plugin development process, including using version control (git) and providing documentation on how to use it. You also have to include a plugin.jquery.json package manifest file, which provides all the information used to describe your plugin on the registry, including the version number, as well as the locations of the files and the documenation.

To register and publish your plugin, you’ll need to push your code to a public repository on GitHub, and add our post-recieve webhook URL (http://plugins.jquery.com/postreceive-hook) to your repository. The next time you push a semver tag, we’ll take care of registering the plugin name and updating its page on the site. When you’re ready to release the next version of your plugin, just tag and push again!

Users can download your plugin however you’d like them to. You can link directly to a JavaScript file for your users to save into their project, take advantage of the GitHub’s built-in zip file distribution, or even link to a custom build tool you may have online for further configuration.

That’s it — no uploading files to us, no wading through forms, and no manual updates for new versions.

(We plan to support other sites in the future! However, we’ve only been able to implement integration with GitHub at this point. If you’d like to assist with adding services, read on!)

Contributing to the Plugin Registry

Our work building the registry has informed and overlapped with a major initiative we’ve taken to open-source all of the content and design of all jQuery web sites. You’ve already seen part of this launch with the new api.jquery.com and jqueryui.com, and we’ll be talking more about this initiative later this week. As it relates to the Plugin Registry, it means that everything from the site documentation to the styles and templates to the post-receive hook itself is open source. So if you notice bugs or have ideas, you can raise and track issues and file your fixes as pull requests. You can even run a local instance of the site to iterate and test your changes.

Of course, if you’re a plugin author, you can also contribute by publishing your plugins to the registry. Even if you haven’t written plugins of your own, you can help out the authors of your favorite plugins by submitting pull requests that add a plugin.jquery.json manifest to their plugin’s repository.

Be Excellent To Each Other

We know this site has been long in the making, and we’re excited to finally be able to open it up for you to use, whether you’re looking for plugins to use in your app or you want to share your work with other developers. We’re looking forward to seeing lots of new plugins and old favorites make their way into the registry, so if you’re a plugin developer, we encourage you to get started as soon as you can with the registration process.

Name registration is on a first-come, first-served basis, and you can’t reserve a name prior to releasing a plugin. However, we recognize there is a huge ecosystem of jQuery plugins already out there, so especially in these early days of the registry’s existence, we do ask that authors reserve judgment and respect for other popular, widely-adopted plugins that may already have a reasonable historical claim to a particular name, even if it has not yet been registered. By and large, we hope that this will discourage “land grab” registrations, but we may step in to manually resolve a situation, should a particularly egregious case arise. “Squatting” on a plugin name is similarly disallowed, and may result in removal without warning!

(Translation: Ben Alman’s BBQ (Back Button & Query) plugin has long been a popular tool for working with the location.hash for navigation. Now is NOT a good time to create and register a sweet plugin for marking up quotations and call it the jQuery BBQ (<bold>,<blockquote>, & <q> plugin!)

That’s All, Folks

Thanks for your patience. Now go forth and publish! Should you encounter any trouble, please file issues, join us in the #jquery-content channel on freenode, or send an e-mail to plugins at jquery dot com

In nature, an ecosystem consists of the organisms, raw materials, and all of the complex interactions that shape their shared environment. The open source ecosystem is no different. Each project has its niche, and any package that is a dependency of course has dependencies of its own. jQuery is used on millions of websites, but we wouldn’t be there without the excellent tools on which we rely to build, test, and distribute our code.

One such tool is Mihai Bazon’s excellent UglifyJS. We’ve been using Uglify to compress jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Mobile for nearly two years now, so if you’ve used any of our minified builds recently, you’ve benefited from Mihai’s work. Recently, he began work on UglifyJS 2.0, which will feature even better compression, support for source maps, and a command line utility. He also announced a Pledgie campaign to support his efforts.

Here at the Foundation, our goal is not just to improve libraries that start with “jQuery,” but rather the entire JavaScript ecosystem in which we all participate. That’s why we’re happy today to announce some exciting news – and to issue a challenge!

Help build UglifyJS 2.0!

We’ve just kicked in 500€ to the campaign to recognize his work so far, but there’s more we all can do. If the community can help us to help Mihai reach his goal of 3,000€  by the end of September, we’ll donate an additional 500€ to the UglifyJS 2.0 project!

We’re looking forward to keeping you posted on the progress here, and participating in similar endeavors in the future to help improve the tools we use each day. In the meantime, thanks for considering a donation (even a small one), and if we haven’t convinced you yet, perhaps this final exhortation will: THINK OF THE BYTES!

Update (5:30): Awesome! The Dojo Foundation has matched our donation!