My favorite jQuery plugins

jQuery, John Resig's brain-child, has an irresistible charm that attracts legions of followers. Many of these followers selflessly share plugins they create for free. So if you have seen a clever, dazzling, intriguing, laborsaving, mind-blowing, {add your favorite adjectives} client-side feature on some site, the odds are high that there is already a jQuery plugin for it.

For long I have smirked at folks who post their compilation of favorite jQuery plugins with attention grabbing titles like "37 More Shocking jQuery Plugins", "37 Phenomenal jQuery Plugins..", "75+ Top jQuery Plugins.." but now I know how hard it is know to about some amazing plugin & keep it to yourself. I wouldn't want to forget the beautiful ones that I've benefited from, so here goes my list of favorites (work in progress) -

JCrop - to crop images programmatically
SearchHighlight - Highlights matched words on a search results page
jQuery-gestures - adds mouse gestures to a webpage
imgAreaSelect - select a rectangular area of an image to crop or annotate
Image Annotation plugin - to add an annotation at a desired position on an image
AutoComplete - "autocomplete" an input field to enable to users quickly find and select some value
Multiple File Upload - upload multiple files at once
quickSearch - for searching through tables, lists, etc quickly
jGrowl - to show fading & sticky message boxes
Pagination - ~5KB plugin to add paging to result-sets

The official jQuery Plugins site accepts plugins from contributors & publishes details in a standard format. The good thing is they come with a demo that you can try out.

I feel the best way in which developers making use of the plugins can help this effort is by rating submissions & reporting issues for the common good.