Designed to make client side scripting easy, jQuery is a JavaScript library that is open source – it works on every important web browser. In doing so, it is an important component in the ability to make sure that client-side scripts can run flawlessly on a web page.
By running scripts client side using jQuery, developers can ensure the user’s web browser takes care of plenty of tasks – in turn improving the experience for the end-user, while saving bandwidth too.
jQuery is used for a lot of different purposes, but typical use cases include everything from a testimonial that rotates to slider effects and popups such as a light box.
An important aspect of jQuery is the fact that a developer can put in place functionality in a browser window that works without the need for the user to load the web page again. Navigation can occur without a page reload, for example; and so can the selection of page elements – developers can also call an Ajax script or even specify what happens when a user triggers an event – like clicking on a specific element on the page.
jQuery is included in the world’s most popular CMS, WordPress – and WordPress includes many essential jQuery libraries too. Developers of WordPress plugins and themes can readily call jQuery within their themes and apps, in doing so they can add custom jQuery scripts right inside their code.
Calling jQuery in a theme or plugin for WordPress is easy – the developer just needs to add a jQuery script of their own and then enqueue this script inside of the WordPress environment. These scripts are able to call both on the core of jQuery or indeed on any jQuery plugin – as long as that jQuery plugin is bundled with WordPress. If so, WordPress will load the jQuery plugin automatically alongside the user’s script.