What are plug-ins and are they free?

What is the best way to find jQuery plugins that do X and selecting the best?

• In the past, in order not to reinvent the wheel, I went hunting for jQuery plugins. The experience has been very frustrating. When I had to find tooltips and lightbox-like plugins, it took me forever. Google returned a lot of results. The search on http://plugins.jquery.com was not very useful to find the best plug-in. It took me hours to go through all the different implementations and find the one that was the best for me. Other times I was not able to find what I wanted until I searched 3 or 4 terms and checked a few websites. What is the best way to filter and search jQuery plugins?

• Answer:

  For the two specific features you mentioned in your question, jQuery UI provides a solution for both (Tooltips are now available in jQuery UI 1.9m2). That being said, I generally start with jQuery UI for UI related tasks. Additionally, there are a few "flags" that indicate whether a plugin is even worthy of consideration - these rules can apply to any code found on the internet: Does it have a publicly available repository (GIT, SVN, etc) (Is there an actual commit history?) Does it appear to be maintained/current? Does it include published unit tests? Is there documentation? If you answer No to any of those questions, then re-assess.