Michael Geary contacted me today to let me know that he’s finished the first third-party jQuery plugin. His particular plugin loads in a remote JSON file, which can then be manipulated further. The chaining of this particular request doesn’t serve many benefits, but this is still something that I’m exploring further (maybe jQuery can support JSON-traversing, along with DOM?).

His code reminds me of a templating/JSON plugin that Jordan and I started developing at BarCampNYC, which allows you to import external templating code. I’ll have more details on this plugin soon (and more details on an AJAX plugin that I’m developing, per the requests of a lot of people).

I’m planning on opening up a plugin repository soon, so that plugin authors can submit their code, have an area for documentation and comments, and allow for patches. More details on this, soon.