45 jQuery Plugins And Tutorials To Enhance Your Forms

Creating awesome and appealing forms for your website has now become easy, thanks to jQuery plugins. Here we are sharing with you a collection of some extremely useful plugins and tutorials to help you create beautiful and awesome web forms.

Web forms are the crucial element for any website as website visitors use such forms to interact with the webmaster. Therefore, keeping them neat and functional while maintaining their aesthetic appeal is important. Here is the complete list. Enjoy!

Boxy –Facebook-like dialog/overlay ( Demo | Download )
Boxy is a flexible, Facebook-style dialog box for jQuery with support for dragging and size tweening.

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A jQuery Inline Form Validation ( Demo | Download )
When it comes to form validation, it’s hard to have a versatile solution that works with every form. Figuring out how to display errors is not a simple task. When an error needs to be displayed, the script creates a div and positions it in the top right corner of the input. This way you don’t have to worry about your HTML form structure. The rounded corner and shadow are done with CSS3 and degrade well in non compliant browsers.

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ToChecklist plugin ( Demo | Download )
The toChecklist plugin for jQuery will give you the functionality of a SELECT box without the need to ctrl+click items to select them.

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A Fancy Contact Form ( Demo | Download )
Providing a simple and reliable means of feedback from site visitors is a crucial part of any web presence. The most simple and common feedback channel are contact forms. In this tutorial we are going to make an AJAX contact form which leverages modern web development techniques.

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Select Multiple Form Fields ( Demo | Download )
asmSelect is a jQuery plugin that answers some of these issues. A progressive enhancement is applied to the select multiple that makes it much easier to use. This enhancement automatically hides the original select multiple, and instead presents a regular select showing the available options, and an HTML list showing the already-selected options.

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Creating a Digg Style Sign Up Form ( Demo | Download )
In this tutorial we are going to simulate their signup form, with unique features such as their dynamic tooltips that give you a hint on each field that is to be filled. The same approach will be adopted for displaying validation messages.

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jQuery Show Password Plugin ( Demo | Download )
This plugin works by adding a text field that takes the value of what is typed into the password field. Then, when the link is clicked the password field is hidden and the text field is shown.

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Create an AJAX/jQuery/PHP Contact Form ( Demo | Download )
This tutorial uses XHTML, CSS, jQuery and a little PHP to make a pop-up/modal contact form that validates whatever is entered into the form and then uses AJAX to send the form without refreshing the page.

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LightForm ( Demo | Download )
LightForm is a free Ajax/PHP contact form. It combines FormCheck2 for fields validation and NiceForms to style text fields and textareas.

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MeioMask ( Demo | Download )
With meioMask plugin you can create and apply maskstot text input fields.

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LiveValidation ( Demo | Download )
LiveValidation is a small open source javascript library for making client-side validation quick, easy, and powerful. It comprises of two main parts. Firstly, it provides developers with a rich set of core validation methods, which can also be used outside the context of forms.

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WordPress plugins for contact forms ( Demo | Download )
There are lots of WordPress plugins for contact forms, but wouldn’t it be nice to have more control over the markup? In this tutorial, Trevor is going to show how to use a custom page template to create a contact form in WordPress without a plugin.

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How to Enhance Forms Using jQuery UI ( Demo | Download )
jQuery makes creating UI so much easier without compromising speed and quality. In this tutorial we are going to enhance form using jQuery UI, so let’s get started

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Submit A Form Without Page Refresh using jQuery ( Demo | Download )
Submit a contact form that sends an email, without page refresh using jQuery, This tutorial will help you creating a form that can be submitted without page refreshing, using JQuery.

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Timepickr ( Demo | Download )
jquery.timepickr was created in a attempt to make the process of inputing time in a form as easy and natural as possible.

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Password Strength Indicator and Generator ( Demo | Download )
In the example about you will see two password boxes and with them you have a generate password link and an icon showing you the strength of your password.

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JQByte StickyForms ( Demo | Download )
StickyForms is a jQuery plugin that automatically saves all form fields into cookies, and then autofills those values on any form that shares element IDs across your site.

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File Style jQuery ( Demo | Download )
Browsers do not let you style file inputs. File Style plugin fixes this problem. It enables you to use image as browse button. You can also style filename field as normal textfield using css. It is written using JavaScript and jQuery.

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Autocomplete ( Demo | Download )
By giving an autocompleted field focus or entering something into it, the plugin starts searching for matching entries and displays a list of values to choose from. By entering more characters, the user can filter down the list to better matches.

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Emblematiq Niceforms ( Demo | Download )
You basically know a web form when you see one as they always look the same and they’ve kept this look over the years. Try as hard as you might but web forms can only change their appearance so much. Some may argue that this is a good usability feature, and I tend to agree, but there comes a time when you just need to style web forms so that they look different. How do you do that? Niceforms comes to the rescue!

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A BETTER FORM – SPAM-LESS ROBOT-LESS FORMS ( Demo | Download )
A Better Form is a jQuery plugin I designed to help eliminate spam comments, spam emails and other automated form submissions.

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Progress Bar ( Demo | Download )
It’s a very simple widget with a small API that exposes a limited number of properties and methods, but it can still be highly effective and is great for providing visual feedback to visitors on the percentage of a process is left before it is complete.

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jQuery AlphaNumeric ( Demo | Download )
jQuery AlphaNumeric is a javascript control plugin that allows you to limit what characters a user can enter on textboxes or textareas.

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Build An Incredible Login Form With jQuery ( Demo | Download )
In this tutorial, we’ll create a sliding panel, that slides in to reveal more content, using JQuery to animate the height of the panel. In this case, we will be creating a hypothetical login for the new tutsplus area that’s coming soon.

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prettyCheckboxes ( Demo | Download )
This script is for people who wants to have a consistent look for checkboxes across browser or those who simply want them to look better. By using this script you wont loose any of the regular inputs usability.

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Improved Current Field Highlighting in Forms ( Demo | Download )
In this tutorial CSS expert Chris Coyier will tell you how to improve your form usuability and enhance them visually.

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jQuery Ajax delete ( Demo | Download )
Removing contents with Ajax is a useful tool to have in any web designers kit. Using a few lines of jQuery we can remove a div and simultaneously remove a record from the database with Ajax. In the download and demo you’ll see a small red cross to the right of each comment. Clicking the cross will remove the comment div with a slide up animation which will remove the div. click the image below to check out the demo.

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jQuery Auto Complete ( Demo | Download )
Auto-complete takes input from the user, and tries to form a list of words that match the users input. The function attaches itself to the input field selected, and also creates the UL drop down from within so all you need is have the styles for it ready.

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Date Picker ( Demo | Download )
Date Picker component with a lot of options and easy to fit in your web application.

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Plugin for Password Masking ( Demo | Download )
This plugin gives users the option to see the chracters of the password the are entering, for usability purposes.

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jQuery Form Plugin ( Demo | Download )
The jQuery Form Plugin allows you to easily and unobtrusively upgrade HTML forms to use AJAX. The main methods, ajaxForm and ajaxSubmit, gather information from the form element to determine how to manage the submit process.

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Input Fields with Images ( Demo | Download )
With this plugin you can add icons or images inside of input fields to add some flair to your forms.

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Elastic ( Demo | Download )
Elastic makes your textareas grow and shrink to fit it’s content. It was inspired by the auto growing textareas on Facebook. The major difference between Elastic and it’s competitors is it’s weight.

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jQuery Checkbox ( Demo | Download )
This plugin allows you to style your forms checkboxes or radio buttons.

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iPhone Style Checkboxes ( Demo | Download )
With this plugin you can enhance standard HTML checkboxes and gives them an iPhone-like styling.

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jQuery Autosave ( Demo | Download )
Autosave is designed to save the progress of forms by saving the fields to cookies so you won’t lose anything should anything go wrong. The plug-in saves the form fields at certain intervals (the default is every 10 seconds) and whenever you leave the page.

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AutoTab ( Demo | Download )
Autotab provides smart auto-tabbing and filtering on text fields in a form. Simply put: once you have typed the maximum number of characters in a text field, you will automatically have focus on the next defined text field. Target text fields are defined, as well as a defined previous text field.

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Magicpreview ( Demo | Download )
Magicpreview automatically updates selected elements on a page based on form fields. Perfect for previewing forms.

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Using form labels as text field values ( Demo | Download )
When designing you sometimes have limited space to put and display all of the form elements. Recently that happened to me and when I was trying to squeeze in a simple newsletter form to a 120px wide area (plus a limited height). I realized that some of the elements will have to go. The obvious solution was to get rid of the labels and put only the form text fields. How will the users know what are the text fields for? I will use value attributes and write the explanation in there, something like “Input your email here”. Problem solved? Not quite. Why? Because I am a web standards freak 🙂

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Checking username availability with ajax using jQuery ( Demo | Download )
The time when username availability is checked after the page is normaly processed is long way behind us. Google has it, Yahoo has it and many many more sites have it, ajax username availability checker. So in this tutorial we will make an ajax username availability checker powered with jQuery.

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jQuery Highlight plugin ( Demo | Download )
Highlight increases usability by highlighting elements as you interact with the page. Its primary use is for forms, but it can also be used for tables, lists, or any element you specify. It can also be used to toggle elements on and off, for example, table rows.

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A Fancy AJAX Contact Form ( Demo | Download )
Ajax Fancy Captcha is a jQuery plugin that helps you protect your web pages from bots and spammers. We are introducing you to a new, intuitive way of completing “verify humanity” tasks. In order to do that you are asked to drag and drop specified item into a circle.

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ASM Select ( Demo | Download )
A progressive enhancement to select multiple form elements. It provides a simpler alternative with lots of advantages.

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BABYSTEPS ( Demo | Download )
BabySteps (A ‘What About Bob?’ reference) is a simple and easily configurable tool for turning long forms into broken out steps without going from page to page.

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BS FORM ACCELERATOR ( Demo | Download )
BS Form Accelerator will be able to use Enter or Space buttons in your forms replacing the buttons such as Tab for changing focus in fields just with assigning an ID to the form.

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