Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

The jQuery.mmenu-plugin is a jQuery plugin for creating slick, app look-alike sliding menus for you mobile website with only one line of javascript. The jQuery.mmenu-plugin provides a few options for customizing your menu. The default option values can be overridden by passing new values to the method.

After the plugin has been fired, a series of custom events are available for the menu. All custom events are bound to the .mmenu-namespace. The jQuery.mmenu-plugin was built using the jQuery-library, it is dual licensed under the MIT and GPL licenses.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://mmenu.frebsite.nl/
License: MIT, GPL License

Tutorialzine has shared a tutorial: Mini AJAX File Upload Form, which tell us how to create an AJAX file upload form, that will let visitors upload files from their browsers with drag/drop or by selecting them individually.

For the purpose, we will combine the powerful jQuery File Upload plugin with the neat jQuery Knob to present a slick CSS3/JS driven interface. Currently, the files are simply moved to the uploads folder, but you can extend it by adding authentication or creating records in your database.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://demo.tutorialzine.com/2013/05/mini-ajax-file-upload-form/
License: License Free

Codrops has shared a tutorial: Responsive Retina-ready Menu that teach us how to create a colorful Retina-ready and responsive menu inspired by the colors of the Maliwan manufacturer of the Borderlands game.

The menu automatically changes to one of three different layouts depending on the browser window size: a “desktop” inline version, a two columns tablet-optimized version and a mobile version with a menu link to display and hide the navigation for smaller screens. To make the menu fully retina-ready, we use an icon font so that the icons of the menu won’t get pixelized on resize.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/ResponsiveRetinaReadyMenu/
License: License Free

MixItUp is a light-weight but powerful jQuery plugin that provides beautiful animated filtering and sorting of categorized and ordered content. It plays nice with your existing HTML and CSS, making it a great choice for fluid, responsive layouts. It’s perfect for portfolios, galleries, blogs, or any categorized or ordered content.

MixItUp uses jQuery to decide which elements to hide, show or re-position based on your filters, and then applies the power of CSS3 transitions to smoothly animate these elements to their new locations. MixItUp is optimized for the current generation of modern, CSS3-ready browsers. Due to its light-weight and efficient approach, It works beautifully and smoothly on all modern devices including smartphones and tablets.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://mixitup.io/
License: Creative Commons 3.0 License

Magnific Popup is a free responsive jQuery lightbox plugin that is focused on performance and providing best experience for user with any device. The majority of lightbox plugins require you to define size of it via JS option. Magnific Popup does not – you can use relative units like EM’s or resize lightbox with help of CSS media queries. Update content inside lightbox without worrying about how it’ll resize and center.

Plugin has an option to automatically switch to alternative mobile-friendly source on small screen size. Default controls are made with pure CSS, without external graphics. For the main image there is a built in way to provide appropriate source for different pixel density displays. Magnific Popup displays images before they’re completely loaded to take full advantage of progressive loading. For in and out transitions CSS3 is used instead of slow JavaScript animation.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://dimsemenov.com/plugins/magnific-popup/
License: MIT License

menu-aim is a jQuery plugin for dropdown menus that can differentiate between a user trying hover over a dropdown item vs trying to navigate into a submenu’s contents. This problem is normally solved using timeouts and delays. menu-aim tries to solve this by detecting the direction of the user’s mouse movement. This can make for quicker transitions when navigating up and down the menu. The experience is hopefully similar to amazon.com/’s “Shop by Department” dropdown.

menu-aim assumes that you are using a menu with submenus that expand to the menu’s right. It will fire events when the user’s mouse enters a new dropdown item and when that item is being intentionally hovered over. You can take a look at the detailed explanation here.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: https://github.com/kamens/jQuery-menu-aim
License: MIT License

Codrops has shared a Simple Youtube Menu Effect Tutorial, which teach us how to recreate the little menu effect that you can see in the left side-menu on YouTube when watching a video (where it says “Guide”).

The menu is made of a little menu icon, a label and a list of menu items that appears when the label or menu icon is clicked. Once it’s clicked the menu icon slides to the right and the label moves up while the list items fade in sequentially. We’ll add some more style and effects to it in order to make it a bit more interesting.

Requirements: JavaScript Framework
Demo: http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/YouTubeLeftSideMenu/
License: License Free

Tooltipster is a powerful, flexible jQuery plugin enabling you to easily create semantic, modern tooltips enhanced with the power of CSS. Tooltipster allows you to use any HTML tag you can think of inside your tooltips. This means you can insert things like images and text formatting tags.

The style of your Tooltipsters can be easily changed by modifying the default Tooltipster theme in the tooltipster.css file. You also have the option to create and attach a brand new theme. Tooltipster’s options gives you a wide range of variables to tweak your tooltip to your heart’s content as well.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://calebjacob.com/tooltipster/
License: License Free

Unslider is the jQuery slider that just slides. No fancy effects or unnecessary markup, and it’s less than 3kb. It’s fluid, flexible, fantastically minimal. Unslider’s been tested in all the latest browsers, and it falls back magnificently for the not-so-latest ones.

If you want to, you can add keyboard arrow support. Not all slides are created equal, and Unslider knows it. It’ll stylishly transition heights with no extra code. You’ll be hard pressed to find a site that’s not responsive these days. Unslider’s got your back. It’s totally responsive.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://unslider.com/
License: License Free