Changes to Plugins Section

[ethransom]

This contains some major changes to the plugins section as discussed in issues #72 and #61.

• Merged A Plugin Development Pattern and Making a JQuery Plugin Truly Customizable into one article, Advanced Plugin Concepts.
• Rewrote Basic Plugin Creation to be more beginner friendly, using http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins/Authoring as a model.
• Minor tweaks to Finding and Evaluating Plugins.

Hopefully this opens things up for more people to work on this section. I'll probably be doing some more work myself.

[ajpiano]

Thanks a lot!! I'll give this an in-depth review once I get through the rest of the content triage. In the meantime, if you're still planning to work in this area, one thing to consider would be expanding "Finding and Evaluating Plugins" into more of an "Plugins: How And Why Do I Use Them?" (kind of what I started discussing in #72)
"Why does jQuery require me to use plugins to do all this stuff? How do I install plugins, how do I use them? How can I tell good ones from bad ones? Using the plugins site (?)"

You can just keep pushing stuff up to this PR as you go. Thanks so much for you hard work so far!

[addyosmani]

Posts we can either pull in or use as reference (covering both criteria for selecting plugins to how to better write them)

• jQuery plugin checklist: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2010/08/26/jquery-plugin-checklist-should-you-use-that-jquery-plug-in/ (actually decent)
• Signs of a poorly written plugin: http://remysharp.com/2010/06/03/signs-of-a-poorly-written-jquery-plugin/
• Why create a plugin?: http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/why-create-a-jquery-plugin/
• Using plugins: (a little useful narrative lower down) http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-aj-jquery4/

[addyosmani]

Thanks again for this @Schnauzer. Were you thinking about addressing any of the points we've made above in this PR?

[ethransom]

I can if you need/want me to, but I wasn't planning on doing it by myself. (Finals week is coming)

[ethransom]

Sorry I've kind of abandoned this PR, I'm going to start working on it again, I promise. I've noticed that all of the other content has been line wrapped, but my new content has not. Is this something we've been trying to maintain, or was that the way the articles were originally written? Is it worth a commit to fix?

[addyosmani]

I think this is the way people have just been writing them. Do you still have plans to keep this PR going or file a new one?

[ethransom]

Would it be okay if this just got merged? That way other people could work on this as well.

[addyosmani]

I think it makes sense to merge this. Thanks for your time on it @Schnauzer. If anyone wishes to continue working on the section we'll point them back to this thread for further areas that can be improved. Cheers!

[addyosmani]

I think it makes sense to merge this. Thanks for your time on it @Schnauzer. If anyone wishes to continue working on the section we'll point them back to this thread for further areas that can be improved. Cheers!