Support the jQuery Validation Plugin

Validate forms like you’ve never been validating before!

Click here to lend your support to: jQuery Validation Plugin and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

This has been the, a tad silly, tag line for the jQuery Validation Plugin for a few years now. Back in 2006, when Jörn Zaefferer started that plugin, he was still employed as a Java developer, contributing to jQuery mostly in his free time. Of the half-dozens plugins he started then, the Validation Plugin became the most succesful and is still quite popular today (builtwith.com knows about more than 300.000 websites using the plugin).

Since late 2010, when Jörn went freelance to focus on just JavaScript projects (no more Java!), maintenance of the plugin didn’t go as well as planned. Early 2012, appendTo was generous to support the project, namely with Max Lynch work through dozens of pull requests and issues, landing a total of 28 commits. Since Max went on to create his own startup, the project went rather quiet again.

This is going to change! And you can be a part of that!

Jörn is looking for donations to spend quality time on the project. The roadmap below outlines a lot of work, probably a lot more than than can be covered by the 4000€ he’s currently asking for.

But that also depends on how much people will contribute in other ways. One part of this effort is to build a community around the plugin.

How can you help?

There’s a few things you can do:

  • You can directly donate to the campaign, any amount helps.
  • You ask your friends, coworkers, boss, spouse and whoever else, to help. If you’re part of a local JavaScript meetup, ask people there.
  • You can also help with the project itself: Look at the roadmap below and see if there’s something you can help with directly or indirectly. Know a good designer who could help with logo and website design? See if you can get them in touch with me. Know a technical writer who could help with website copy and documentation? Also very welcome!

The campaign also provides a detailed roadmap for what I’m planning to do with the plugin.

Spread the word

Help us get enough donations to get this project the attention it deserves. Share it on Twitter, Facebook, G+, Orkut, in your office, local newspaper, train station, airport, parliament! Call your senator!

-Jörn

No more comments.
  1. Hi Jörn,

    I’m really pleased to hear about the plans for the jQuery Validation Plugin. I originally started using the jQuery Validation Plugin on an ASP.NET MVC project in conjunction with jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js and I’ve found it invaluable on my last couple of projects.

    I believe that jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js is created by Microsoft
    ( http://bradwilson.typepad.com/blog/2010/10/mvc3-unobtrusive-validation.html ) but I’ve found not masses of information out there about it.

    I was wondering if this was a development that has your blessing? I do hope so!

    And also I was curious as to whether this might actually become part of the jQuery Validation Plugin in the longer term? After all, the unobtrusive aspect of this is essentially server technology agnostic. It just so happens that it’s ASP.NET MVC in my case. It could be anything on the server generating HTML with the relevant data-val-* attributes. I would imagine that this would be something that would be welcomed by developers who use other server technologies. And the more the merrier in my opinion!

  2. @John: It may not be obvious from the blog post, but their solution builds on top of this plugin. In later iterations, they’ve actually removed some more of their own glue code (the blog post is from 2010).

    So from that perspective, there’s not really anything to adopt. The latest release, 1.10.0, added a feature for specifying messages with data-msg attributes.

  3. Thanks for replying Jörn. It’s good to know you’re aware of jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js. I guess I just wanted to know that this was something that was on your radar.

    You don’t happen to know who “owns” jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js do you? I’ve looked around and whilst I can find plenty of people using it I can’t seem to find someone to whom you might report problems / make suggestions…