I've decided to start my personal advent calendar. Every day (starting from today till Dec 24th), I'll write about what I learned that day on my blog. Here goes my first post about learning how to author jQuery plugins.
Getting started
To write a jQuery plugin, we start by adding a new function property to the `jQuery.fn` object. This can be done like this:
jQuery.fn.myPlugin = function() {
// plugin code goes here without using `$` :(
};
You might have noticed that I haven't used my beloved `$` sign as it might collide with another libraries that might use the same sign. So, a best practice would be to send the jQuery object to an IIFE like this:
(function( $ ) {
$.fn.myPlugin = function() {
// plugin code goes here and I can happily use `$` :)
};
})( jQuery );
Context
`this` keyword would refer to the jQuery object the plugin was invoked on and not the native DOM object. So, we can directly use `this` instead of writing `$(this)`. Also, returning `this` would preserve the method chainability
I'm still going through the documentation to learn how to set options and how to bind events which I'll share tomorrow.