25+ jQuery Plugins that enhance and beautify HTML form elements

Written by Kevin Liew on 15 Apr 2009
543,149 Views • Javascript

Introduction

This article will cover the following elements:

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Form Skinning

Frustrated with the form elements inconsistency among different browsers? With these jQuery plugins, you can unified the look and feel of all your form elements.

Form Validation

It's always good to have client side form validation. These jQuery plugin will save your times and works by reusing already made form validation.

Masking

Masking can help to avoid human mistake. I found these plugins are very helpful to guide users and decrease the chances of bad data.

File Uploader

These file uploader transform the orginal input file element into a more robust file uploader that able to upload multiple files and having a progress bar to indicate the upload progress.

Checkbox & Radio Button

Spice it up your checkbox and radio button with these jQuery plugins!

Spin Button & Slider

Spin button can be useful sometimes. The other alternative will be a slider.

Auto Complete

You must have seen the auto complete functionality from Apple.com, google.com and all the major websites. With the following plugins, we, too can implement it in our websites easily.

Calendar & Time picker

The old school method to let user select date and time are using drop down lists (day, month and year). Now, we can use a calendar, timepicker to replace the old way. Since it's picked from calendar, it decreases the chances of invalid date. I like them.

Drop Down Menu (Select Element)

Want to do more with drop down menu? These plugins able to add more capabilities to drop down menu.

Color Picker

If you are building some online tools that involves colours, I guess you will like the following plugins. jQuery based colour pickers!

Textarea

Sometimes, we get really annoyed when we have to type in message in such a small space (a textarea), and we have to scroll up and down, left and right (sometimes) to read the entire message. Say no more to scrolling! Add this autogrow/resizer capability to textarea to avoid that.

Conclusion

All the plugins are implemented using jQuery, there are still heaps of them out there. Of course, you might able to find other good stuff which are not made from jQuery. If you wrote jQuery plugin that enhances form, and you think it's really cool. Drop me a comment, I will add it in.

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144 comments
Tony Oravet 15 years ago
Great list here. Another great way to engage the user into your website and give them some elements that they can use to help immerse them into the site.
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Patternhead 15 years ago
Great resource, jQuery rocks :)
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art2code 15 years ago
very nice list!
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choen 15 years ago
nice list...thanks
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Lachlan 15 years ago
As usual, I find out about these fantastic plugins only after delaying a project by writing my own. Thanks for a complete list!
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MarcoBarbosa 15 years ago
Nice! Thanks for making the list :)

Very usefull.
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Tiago Faustino 15 years ago
jqTransform and Emblematiq Niceforms not work fine in IE6 and IE7, the images of the hover load slowly or not load... in Firefox it run nice.
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Clefevre 15 years ago
Isn't Fancy Form Mootools?
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Raymond Selda 15 years ago
Wonderful collection! Thank you!
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Rahul 15 years ago
I liked the Calender & Time picker. Others are also good.
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Janos 15 years ago
Super nice, instant bookmark.
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Roman Ozana 15 years ago
Thank's a lot, nice list !
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Kamil Bugala 15 years ago
Great list , I'd just add one more.. easy slider , here is a link:
http://cssglobe.com/post/4004/easy-slider-15-the-easiest-jquery-plugin-for-sliding
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