PaulSpoerry.com

The jQuery UI team has announced today, the release of v1.7 of their effects and UI controls framework. They have also opened up greater communication with the community via the new development wiki.

There’s a ton of new stuff in 1.7. They’ve fixed hundreds of bugs since 1.5.3 and are introducing many new features, a better core architecture, and major theming improvements.

The key new features include:

• A new site dedicated to the jQuery UI project
• jQuery 1.3 compatibility
• Revamped and optimized plugins
• A new extensible CSS framework
• Major enhancements to the Themeroller theming applicaton
• Demos & Documentation including offline support
• Bundled themes

The introduction of the new ThemeRoller-ready CSS framework is especially important as it not only allows for easy theming of included jQuery UI but also allows plugin developers to create their own extensions that can take advantage of ThemeRoller’s visual theming capabilities.

This new release is immediately available for download and the team has provided a Getting Started with jQuery UI page to help get new users up to speed quickly.

Read more on the new release on Ajaxian.