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With blogs becoming more and more user-friendly everyday, the need for a “Featured Post” display became a necessity. Say, for example, you begin a free giveaway on your blog on Monday. By Friday, if you had posted everyday during the week, that giveaway post from Monday may be on page 2, never to be seen again. This is where a “Featured Post” display comes in most handy. It appears that the use of jQuery to implement a very eye-appealing animated “Featured Post” display is becoming more and more in demand in the world of Wordpress themes. Here are some of the most popular javascript plugins to get the job done:

1. s3Slider – One of the most common types of “Featured Post” displays (and the one I use).
2. JSGallery – Maybe you want no words and only the post thumbnail images to display.
3. Agile Carousel – Another powerful jQuery slideshow-like plugin.
4. jCarousel Lite – Very lightweight javascript carousel plugin.

Tabbing systems are becoming increasingly popular in all forms of web design, not just Wordpress. This is expected, as they are a very unique and effective way of displaying alot of content in a small amount of space. Common uses of tabs in Wordpress include displaying popular posts, recent comments, post categories, etc, etc… You get the idea. Here are some of the more popular solutions to getting yourself a fully-functional tabbing system in just a few minutes:

1. StereoTabs – Simple tabbing system, part of the scriptaculous library.
2. DOMTabs – I’ve heard good things about this system.
3. TabMenu – Another great and lightweight tabbing system.
4. Tabifier – Another lightweight javascript tabbing script.
5. UI Tabs – Powerful tabbing system run off of jQuery.

noobSlide
Another slider plug-in created using MooTools.

Easy Slider
Easy Slider enables images or any content to slide horizontally or vertically on click. Features include: auto-slide, continuous sliding, “Go to first” and “Go to last” buttons, hiding controls, optional wrapping markup for control buttons, vertical sliding, multiple sliders on one page. Check out the demo here.

Supersized – full-screen background/slideshow jQuery plug-in
Supersized is a jQuery plug-in that automatically resizes (background) images to the size of the browser and runs them as a slideshow. It is lightweight and plays nice with all browsers. Check out the demo here.

Animated JavaScript slideshow
New features for this dynamic JavaScript slideshow include description support, link support, no naming restrictions, portrait image support, graceful degradation and active thumbnail status. Check out the demo here.

Moving Boxes
A jQuery slider with buttons to change panels, and the panels zoom in and out. Check out the demo here.

Prototype Carousel with script.aculo.us
A Prototype-based carousel that allows for n-item paging. Items within the carousel can be extracted from the HTML itself and so can be indexed by search engines. It also allows for vertical, horizontal and grouped paging. Check out the demo here.

Read the full article at SmashingMagazine: 70 New, Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

Duplicate the jQuery home page tool tips using MooTools
The jQuery home page has a pretty suave tool tip-like effect, as seen above. Here’s how to accomplish the same effect using MooTools.

Prototip
Prototip allows you to easily create both simple and complex tool tips using the Prototype JavaScript framework. You can easily customize it, control the tool tip position and get configurable rounded corners (with no PNG images required).

Simpletip
Simpletip is a plug-in for the popular jQuery JavaScript library. It allows you to create tool tips with ease for any element on the page using the power of jQuery’s selectors and event management. The tool tips can be static, dynamic or even loaded through AJAX with a variety of different visual effects.

Coda pop-up bubbles
Re-create Coda’s ‘puff’ pop-up bubbles, shown when you mouse over a downloadable image.

Read the full article at SmashingMagazine: 70 New, Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

Timeframe
A click-and-drag timeframe, with a function for defining ranges. A better calendar. Check out the demo here.

Create astonishing iCal-like calendars with jQuery
Similar to the iPhone Calendar application, with event description that shows up on mouse hover. The trickiest part is making your images seamless and using a single image for all the graphics whenever possible to decrease download time. Check out the demo here.

Dateslider
This element enables you to pick dates with a simple slider bar. By dragging the bar over the timeline, the dates change instantly. And when the user decides to manually change dates, the bar is automatically adjusted to the corresponding dates. Check out the demo here.

Elegant animated weekly timeline
This tutorial explains how to design an elegant and animated weekly timeline, with daily annotations, that you can customize and reuse quickly in your Web projects. Check out the demo here.

70 New, Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques

Unobtrusive datePicker widget
This unobtrusive datePicker (calendar), which is accessible using the keyboard, requires no embedded JavaScript blocks, uses no pop-up windows and is suitable for use within documents served as application/XHTML+XML. Check out the demo here.

Date Picker
Date Picker jQuery plug-in allows users to select a date or range of dates easily. It includes a lot of options: multiple calendars; single, multiple and range selection; marking of special, weekend and special dates; an easy-to-customize look via CSS; custom day to start the week, a fit with the viewport.

Read the full article at SmashingMagazine: 70 New, Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques