We've all seen the custom jQuery plugins that people publish, but... do you know how they work?
Let's take a quick tutorial to show you how to emulate one of the more popular ones. This is similar to the example on the jQuery website.
Text Snippet:
$.fn.backgroundColor = function(colour) {
this.css({background: colour});
};
To use it you'd call:
Text Snippet:
$('.myelement').backgroundColor('red');
Which, if you had an element with a class of 'myelement' then it'd turn 'red'.
You can get pretty in depth with plugins. I try to wrap most my element specific JavaScript into a plugin. It makes it so much easier to get things normalised, and in doing so I prevent a mess of JS down the line.