Our Joyride jQuery Plugin Gets an Overhaul

Joyride has been around for almost a year and is very well-received so far. Many tours were planned and many tours were taken. We heard lots of great feature requests and kept them in our back pocket until a client needed something specific changed. This prompted us to start working on version 2. To ensure that we got something that made big improvements, we pretty much started from scratch. This allowed us to see the problem from a different perspective and figure out where we could make Joyride even better than before.

So What The Heck Changed?

Part of this tune-up was about performance. We removed the sloppy jQuery selectors and used native JavaScript methods where code was executed repeatedly, such as in options parsing. The other area was support for more options. These new options include:

• It's responsive and will be included in Foundation 3.2
• Replaced counters with the .next() method
• Data-button attribute defined buttons, data-text will be deprecated in 3.0
• Edge-aware tooltips that reposition based on proximity to the edge of the window
• Pause, Resume, Restart, and Destroy — https://gist.github.com/3430584
• Updated to jQuery 1.8.2, supports 1.4.2 and up
• Support for class based targeting with data-class
• Modal style tooltips (li elements without a data-id or data-class attribute).
• Moved tooltip templating to settings
• Cookies have been extracted and are now optional
• Better support for right and left aligned tooltips
• Deprecated inline positioning of tooltips
• Both postStepCallback and postRideCallback now return a reference the the last tip index and jquery object

You now have a lot more control over how you build and use your Joyride tours. Not much changed on the outside, but when you open up the hood you've got a whole new finely-tuned beast ready to give some amazing tours. Joyride 2 works on any screen size if you need it to; we've included a mobile.css file in the download that will take care of the media queries for Joyride.

To the Future and Beyond

We've been hinting at what's to come in Foundation 3.2 over the past week or so. We're going to do it again ... Joyride 2 will be included as a default plugin for Foundation towards the end of October. This means that it will work responsively straight out of the box without needing to add an extra stylesheet. You'll be able to quickly build prototypes, production code and give people a fun ride too!