Today we’re pleased to announce a new addition to the jQuery community: jQuery Meetups. Over the past year we’ve been watching a number of local jQuery meetups spring up and we wanted to try and provide a good home for them.

We talked with a number of people behind existing jQuery meetup groups and asked them what resources they wanted. Overwhelmingly we heard that they wanted a way to centralize all the planning and discussion around their meetup groups and have a way to get more attention to their groups.

After some research and work we’ve come up with something that should suit the community well:

We looked at a number of potential solutions and eventually went with Ning. Ning provides an easy way to get social communities up and running all while putting very little burden on the jQuery team as maintainers. The Ning team was very gracious and provided us with all the resources that we needed to get it up and running. There exist capabilities for creating meetup groups, having centralized group discussions, and planning out future meetups.

For example, here’s a sample meetup:

As a project we want to try and help local jQuery meetup groups grow and flourish: Being able to talk and network with fellow jQuery users can be a huge boon to development. For now we want to watch and see how the groups take off and eventually try to provide more resources to them (either in the way of more web resources or physical items like pizza, books, t-shirts, etc.). We’d love to get your feedback on this so if you have any questions or suggestions please let us know over in the forums.

Watch as Paul walks you through the improvements and additions to the API in jQuery 1.4. He demonstrates with real-world examples how you’ll put these new features to use, along with recommendations on performance and useful hints on the internals.

In the last installment of Hawtness, Paul covers the things that could potentially break, and walks through each item in detail. If you’re trepidatious about upgrading your 1.3 to 1.4.1, never fear. In addition to this overview, a compatibility plugin is available to those who want a transition as smooth as Jif Creamy™. The code discussed in ep #6 is viewable and forkable on github

Today we’re adding two excellent community members to the jQuery team: Paul Irish and Dave Methvin.

Paul is an active member of the jQuery community participating in, and administrating, the jQuery IRC channels and frequently blogging about jQuery and its functionality. He is also the co-creator of the yayQuery podcast. Paul joined the jQuery team to help produce videos for the 14 Days of jQuery and to move the API documentation to its new home for the 1.4 release. As a member of the developer relations team he will work to make sure that the expectations of developers are being met in jQuery itself, helping the core team to communicate clearly and effectively.

Dave is a long-time contributor to jQuery, providing extensive help on the jQuery bug tracker and in the jQuery discussion forums. As a member of the jQuery team he works to provide test cases, triage bugs, and commit to jQuery core.

Join us in welcoming both of them to the team!