jquery-expander
The Expander Plugin (License: MIT and GPL) by Karl Swedberg can collapse part of an element’s content and add ‘read more’ links. Truncation is based on characters, and this can be changed along with many other things when invoking the plugin:
$(selector).expander({
slicePoint: 100
, preserveWords: true
, expandText: 'read more'
, expandPrefix: '… '
});
Marco Polo
Marco Polo (License: MIT, demo) by Justin Stayton is an autocomplete plugin with some interesting features:
- Prevents unnecessary requests using a cache
- Automatic selection, in a similar fashion to
selectinputs - Require selections
- Supports large text through overlabel support
- Easy styling
- Event-based, with public access
These features are documented in the Marco Polo wiki. This simple example demonstrates how results can be obtained and formatted:
$('#userSearch').marcoPolo({
url: '/users/search',
formatItem: function(data, $item) {
return data.first_name + ' ' + data.last_name;
},
onSelect: function(data, $item) {
window.location = data.profile_url;
}
});
Manifest
Manifest (License: MIT, examples) also by Justin Stayton enhances text inputs so multiple items can be selected and edited. The API is very consistent with Marco Polo, and Manifest can take a marcoPolo object if autocomplete functionality is required.
$('#recipients').manifest({
marcoPolo: {
url: '/contacts/search',
formatItem: function(data) {
return '"' + data.name + '" (' + data.email + ')';
}
}
});
The author also points out how these plugins differ from the popular Chosen plugin:
If you want to make a select element with a lot of options more user-friendly, use Chosen. If you can’t reasonably list out every possible option (like all users in a system), or you need to allow arbitrary values (like new tags), use Manifest.
CacheProvider
Felipe Abreu sent us a client-side caching library called CacheProvider (License: MIT). He hasn’t yet written a README, but the most of the methods in the CacheProvider source are nicely commented so it’s easy to follow how it works.
It’s a continuation of the JavaScript Cache Provider class by Dustin Diaz. Like Diaz’s class, CacheProvider will use localStorage if available.
