Wijmo: A More Expansive jQuery UI

jQuery UI is one of the cooler things to come out with jQuery. It allows you to easily install widgets and simple capabilities onto your site quickly and easily. ThemeRoller makes it even more fun by allowing you to style the widgets in nearly limitless ways. There is one place where jQuery UI is lacking though: the number of widgets it provides. This is where Wijmo comes in.

What is Wijmo?

Wijmo is a kit of UI widgets that extends jQuery UI to give you a much larger selection of widgets. How many widgets do they have? The short answer is “over 40”. But that doesn’t do them much justice. If you check out their site, you’ll see their huge list of widgets, but then you can and look at each widget and discover just how flexible, powerful, and feature-filled they are.

Dojo‘s widget library (known as Dijit) has always dwarfed jQuery’s measly UI plugin, but with Wijmo on the scene, jQuery can feel a little more stable at the top of the JavaScript library podium.

What Does Wijmo Have?

Wijmo comes with nearly a dozen different graphs and charts, accordions, calendars, sliders, select boxes, light boxes, custom form inputs, text editor, menus, pagination, progress bars, and a whole lot more. There’s way more than I can give justice to in this one blog post, so go to their widgets page to see their entire list.

Do They Have Theming Too?

Yup, just like jQuery UI, they have themes that you can include with the JavaScript library. Their built-in themes are hosted on their custom Content Delivery Network – just like their scripts – to give you and your users super fast and compressed downloads. If you want to create a custom theme, then you actually just use jQuery UI’s ThemeRoller to create the CSS files for you! Wijmo is entirely compatible with the CSS spit out by ThemeRoller.

Conclusion

If you’ve enjoyed jQuery UI, but wanted some more widgets, or you’re just looking for one library to handle all the widgets you’d ever use on your site, then look no further than Wijmo. There is one downside that I forgot to mention earlier: if you want all 40+ widgets and their built in themes, it costs money. They have a free download for 18 of the widgets, but the rest of it is definitely meant for enterprise projects and not for small devs looking to mess around and have some fun.