This is the final post in The Beginner’s Guide To Writing a jQuery Plugin.
We’ve covered a lot of stuff:
- Development Tools
- Project Requirements and Iterations (1, 2)
- The jQuery Model For Plugin Development
- ..and more
But if you’re a serious developer and plan to continue developing your own plugins, there are a few things you can do that will help get the word out about your release.
1. Submit Your Work To The jQuery Plugin Site
This should be the first step to releasing every jQuery plugin that you create. Generally speaking, you’ll be putting the word out about your plugin on the official jQuery site along with thousands of other developers.
- Create an account (or login, if you already have one).
- Fill out the form for adding your project
- View the page the site generates for your work (example).
This site also publishes an RSS feed so you can monitor what others are doing and others can pick up on what you’re doing.
2. Share It
The next thing you’ll want to do is promote it on your various properties.
- Blog. Titling the post and using some rich keywords in the post will result in some good SEO for your work.
- Tweet. Share a link to the project site or the project post on Twitter. This is good for getting others to see you’ve released something that may be useful. Others may even retweet you.
- Promote. Post your work in communities such as Forrst and Dribbble. I’ve had nothing but great experiences and ideas for improvements when sharing with other people in fields of similar interest.
Most importantly, do the above with care. Promoting your work too much can come across as arrogant. A single post and a tweet or two is fine, but don’t fill up others’ readers and Twitter streams with you talking about your own work.
3. Contact Others
I absolutely do not recommend spamming authors of larger sites or blogs to get them to promote your work, but if you’ve got a relationship with such others or if they’ve featured some of your work in prior posts, email them.
Let them know about what you’ve just released and see if they’d be interested in covering some of the stuff you’ve done. Sometimes they will; other times they won’t, but it can’t hurt to ask.
That’s all – hopefully this series has been helpful in getting you you started in writing your own jQuery plugins and has provided a good foundation for future work.
Ben Holland says
Hi Tom,
Great post. I’m just about to go through the process of promoting my jQuery plugin so I’ll definitely be following your advice.
You can check the plugin. It’s called the Slidorion and is a combination of a slider and an accordion. Check it out at http://www.slidorion.com.
Let me know what you think.
Thanks
Tom McFarlin says
Nice – really dig the plugin!