Great news, everyone! Today is jQuery’s 1 Year “Birthday”! (I released it 1 year ago, today, at BarCamp New York City) In celebration, we’ve got a bunch of stuff for you to enjoy.

1) jQuery 1.1

This is a great release – tons of bug fixes, huge speed improvements, and a big simplification of the outstanding API. It is highly recommend that you upgrade to get all the benefits of this release.

Download Now:

• jQuery 1.1
• jQuery 1.1 Compressed
• jQuery 1.1 – All Code, Docs, and Tests
• jQuery 1.1 – Build Your Own Copy of jQuery

Upgrade Guide:

Please read through these guides before upgrading from 1.0.4 to 1.1 – a number of API changes have been made, and these guides detail how to work through them, and how to use the new jQuery 1.0 Compatibility Plugin to keep 1.0-style functionality in 1.1.

• English (Part 2)
• French
• Italian

New Features:

• By all of our counts, jQuery 1.1’s selectors are 10x-20x faster than those in jQuery 1.0.4. This should provide a noticable difference in your jQuery applications.
• Common selectors like div#id, div .class, td:nth-child(1), and div > div are all significantly faster. It’s a complete world of difference. Try them out and you’ll see.
• You can now pass in a function as a value for an attribute or a css property. The function is executed and its return value is set as the value for the property. For example:

  // 1.0 Code
  $("a").each(function(){
      $(this).attr("href", "/item/" + this.id);
  }).show();
  
  // 1.1 Code
  $("a").attr("href", function(){ return "/item/" + this.id; }).show();

• You can now unbind an event handler from within itself. This allows you to have event handlers that are only bound for a specific number of executions, for example:

  $("button").click(function(e){
      // Unbind the event handler if a specific form is hidden
      if ( $("#submitForm").is(":hidden") ) {
          $(this).unbind( e );
      }
  });

• Easily bind an event that will only occur once (this replaces the old .oneclick() functionality):

  // Show a thank you message for a form submission, but only once
  $("form").one("submit",function(){
      $("#thankyou").show();
  });

• You can now set the text value of an element (this is different from .html(), where in .text() all HTML is displayed as text).

  $("pre").text("<b>Hello</b>, how are you?");
  
  // Result:
  <pre>&lt;b&gt;Hello&lt;/b&gt;, how are you?</pre>

• You can now build your own filters, using a custom function. (This was in 1.0, but it wasn’t documented very well.)

  // Find all divs whose parent isn't hidden
  $("div").filter(function(){
    return $(this).parent(":hidden").length > 0;
  });

• You can now pass a comma-separated list of selectors to the following filter functions:
  filter, find, not, siblings, parents, children, next, prev. This allows you to do some very cool stuff:

  // Find all radio buttons, or checkboxes, in a form
  $("form input").filter(":radio, :checkbox");
  
  // Find the next element that's a span, or a div
  $(this).next("span, div");

2) Refreshed Web Site Design

The design of the jQuery web site has finally be given a much-needed facelift. This was planned out by the fantastic jQuery Design Team and implemented by Nate Cavanaugh. The design team has a full redesign/restructuring planned, but we wanted something that would help us get from our current design to the complete overhaul. Hope you enjoy it – and be sure to thank Nate, Bradley, or Skye for their job well done!

3) Overhauled Documentation

A big point that we’ve been working with, lately, was to really pull together and categorize the jQuery Documentation, Tutorials, and API into one centralized location. The result of this effort is the new:
http://docs.jquery.com/
All jQuery documentation can be found in this one, central, location – making it easier for you to find what you need and get your work done faster. We hope you enjoy this new structuring, please let us know if you have any suggestions for what we can add to make it better.

4) A Secret…

We’ve been holding this one back a while, but we’re finally ready to let it go… There’s a jQuery Book in the works! An excited publisher has stepped up, and the authors are already a quarter of the way complete. There’s still some details in the works, and we’re going to tell all once its getting nearer to completion, but right now it’s looking like we’re going to have a late-Spring/early-Summer release of the first jQuery book!

I hope you enjoy everything – a lot of time and effort has really gone into making this release great. Be sure to thank everyone on the jQuery Team, they’ve put a lot of time and effort into making this release come out really good.

I’ll be doing a “State of the Query” post tomorrow, to talk about where jQuery has come during this past year, and the evangelism team will be doing a couple blog posts about what you can do with the new jQuery 1.1.

Thank you, everyone, for making this a fantastic first year for jQuery.