Our free jQuery JB LIbrary plugin is looking like getting major release later this week or early next week. One of the things that gets in the way of using jQuery within Joomla is that there are often issues with multiple instances of the jQuery library loading on the page. These extra versions of the library get loaded via modules and major components alike (community builder and jomsocial both load the jquery library).

Our aim with this plugin is to replace the need for other joomla extensions to load jQuery. While I've written about our reasons for doing this before I thought I would highlight the changes and updates to JB Library that will add more flexibility and hopefully work with greater compatibility with components that do not have an option to switch the loading of the jQuery library off.

The major features being added to the library are:

• The ability to select specific menu items to load the JB LIbrary plugin. This is a great feature that will give you more control for those components that dont provide the ability to switch off jQuery.
• The ability to strip other versions of jQuery getting loaded on the page. This is a regular expression search to remove any reference to the typical jQuery library reference syntax. Obviously this is not a cure all as some extensions load the jQuery library and their jQuery scripts in the one file. This will of course have the function to allow scripts that you specify to still load on the page.

The above options will hopefully serve to make using jQuery with Joomla a little less problematic and help out users who don't want to or know how to hack the core files of the Joomla extensions that dont provide the ability to turn the library reference off.