Before I go any further, it’s probably important to address a question you might be asking yourself: “Why would I want to make my own plugin?” The best reason that comes to my mind is portability. If you’ve ever created a large-scale project, take a look back into your source code and note how many of the hundreds of lines of jQuery code you could put into a plugin to reuse on a different project. You probably invested a lot of time and energy into that code, so it doesn’t make sense to reinvent the wheel if you ever need that functionality again. If that’s not enough of a reason for you, I can also tell you that if you develop your own jQuery plugin, you’ll level-up in cool points, and the jQuery community will love you.

For this post, let’s create a jQuery plugin that simply returns, “This is our awesome plugin!” Our first step involves putting together the basic skeleton used by every plugin:

(function($) {
    $.fn.slPlugin = function() {
 
            // Awesome plugin stuff goes here
    };
}) (jQuery);

This is your template — your starting point. Practice it. Remember it. Love it. The “slPlugin” piece is what I chose to name this plugin. It’s best to name your plugin something unique … I always run a quick Google search to ensure I don’t duplicate the name of a plugin I (or someone else) might need to use in a project alongside my plugin. In this case, we’re calling the example plugin slPlugin because SoftLayer is awesome, and I like naming my plugins after awesome things. I’ll save this code in a file called jquery.slPlugin.js.

Now that we have our plugin’s skeleton, let’s add some default values for variables:

(function($) {
    $.fn.slPlugin = function(options) {
            var defaults = {
                myVar: "default", // this will be the default value of this var
                anotherVar: 0,
                coolVar: "this is cool",                
            };
            var options = $.extend(defaults, options);
    };
}) (jQuery);

Let’s look at the changes we made between the first example and this one. You’ll notice that in our second line we added “options” to become $.fn.slPlugin = function(options) {. We do this because our function is now accepting arguments, and we need to let the function know that. The next difference you come across is the var defaults blurb. In this section, we’re providing default values for our variables. If you don’t define values for a given variable when you call the plugin, these default values will be used.

Now let’s have our plugin return the message we want to send:

(function($) {
    $.fn.slPlugin = function(options) {
            var defaults = {
                myVar: "This is", // this will be the default value of this var
                anotherVar: "our awesome",
                coolVar: "plugin!",
            };
            var options = $.extend(defaults, options);
            this.each(function() {
                ourString = myVar + " " + anotherVar + " " + coolVar;
            });
            return ourString;
    };
}) (jQuery);

We’ve defined our default values for our variables, concatenated our variables and we’ve added a return under our variable declaration. If our jQuery plugin is included in a project and no values are provided for our variables, slPlugin will return, “This is our awesome plugin!”

It seems rather rudimentary at this point, but we have to crawl before we walk. This introductory post is laying the groundwork of coding a jQuery plugin, and we’ll continue building on this example in the next installment of this series. As you’ve seen with the LazyLoad, equalHeights and Select2, there are much more complicated things we can do with our plugin, and we’ll get there. Sneak Preview: In the next installment, we’ll be creating and implementing a truncation function for our plugin … Get excited!

-Cassandra