This week's "Friday jQuery humor" post is a bit late. Anyway, let's see how tough are you?

As it was described in our previous post “How to prepare your plugin for the new jQuery plugins site” you will need to add a manifest file if you want your plugin to appear on the new jQuery plugins site. In this post we will cover everything you need to know about the manifest file, how to format it and where to put it.

What is a jQuery plugin manifest file?

It is a JSON file (not JavaScript literal) that carries all necessary information about your plugin. Information like: plugin name, description, version, author, homepage, licenses, plugin dependencies, etc. The upcoming plugins.jquery.com site will use this data to populate its’ database and create an individual pages for each plugin.

Manifest file naming conventions

The manifest file’s name must be yourpluginname.jquery.json. For example, jTwitter plugins manifest file name would be named: jtwitter.jquery.json. Please be advised, at first the file name was planned to be package.json (following common.js conventions). However, after some discussions it was changed to *.jquery.json.

There is also a concept of suites. Suites are a way to namespace many plugins in a single repository (e.g. jQuery UI would name their fils: ui.tabs.jquery.json). Suites are created manually by jQuery team.

I thought I’d spice thing up a bit with some humour related to jQuery and JavaScript from my experience. With the new work and responsibilities, this kind of “surprise” happened to me more than once :)

If you like it, please share. Depending on the interest, this might become more periodic thing.

It’s been over a year since the unfortunate event that whipped out the plugins.jquery.com site’s database. But sometimes unfortunate events lead to better things and that’s the case with the Plugins site. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel and create a website equally useful for plugin users and plugin developers (while fighting spam, maintaining the servers, etc.), the team decided to embrace the power of existing tools. Now plugin developers will maintain their code on GitHub taking full advantage of all its’ features, while jQuery Foundation concentrates on building a better user experience for “plugin users”.

This means that plugin development and maintenance lifecycles are moving over to more confortable and more suitable for this kind of work GitHub platform.

There seems to be a lot of confusion among “plugin users”, that they’ll need to deal with GitHub and such. “NO” – plugin users will see all necessary information about the plugin on a user friendly plugins.jquery.com website.

Happy New Year everyone! I would like to give you a heads up with the news that the blog will become “live” again with more regular and interesting posts around jQuery and JavaScript. For the last couple of years I have been involved in a very fast growing start-up with a vibrant developers team. I have learned a lot during this period, so I decided to also cover topics about maintaining frequently changing codebase, programming best practices for better code maintenance and also tools & tips to stay sane.

To get things moving I spent couple of days redesigning the blog theme using Twitter Bootstrap and dressing it up to Blogger template (if there is a demand, I can polish the template’s code and release it to the public). I hope you like the new look. If there are any bugs, please leave a message on Facebook or Twitter.

Happy New Year and happy coding…