One of my goals over the last year has been to convert most of the JavaScript I use on visitlondon.com to use the jQuery library. One of the big advantages of jQuery is a library of pre-existing and thoroughly tested plugins for simplifying a lot of common tasks.

Here's what I've been using; if you use jQuery, what plugins do you think are essential?

• Obviously, jQuery itself, the latest version (which is 1.3.2 at the time of writing).

• jQuery UI, the latest version (1.7.2) customised to contain just the core, draggable (see it action on the tube map^[1]) and datepicker functionality. I have a project on the horizon where I'll probably be using the full range of widgets and interactions.

• Lightbox plugin, (see it action on our Peter Pan site)

• Validation plugin, just starting to use this (see a simple example) but very pleased with it so far.

• Mouse Wheel Extension, to enable mouse wheel based zooming of maps (see it in action)

• jCarousel plugin, (see it action at the bottom of the page on our London Restaurant Festival site)

• Flashembed plugin, I'm actually using an old version of this as I had to modify it to avoid clashes with some of our CSS but most of the modifications have now been done better in the new versions so I'll probably be upgrading soon

1. There's a problem with Webkit powered browsers - if the item to be dragged is an image map then the mousedown action never reaches the drag code. Hence Chrome and Safari users will see a box with scrollbars instead on that page.

Picking up from my first attempt here's a more methodical approach. With somewhat more success this time.

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