This is the successor and port of my original jQuery MultiSelect Plugin to a jQuery UI widget. While both will actively be maintained, I highly recommend you use this version over the plugin version. It has a more robust feature set, is faster, and is much more flexible. MultiSelect turns an ordinary HTML select control into an elegant drop down list of checkboxes with themeroller support.

This version inherits all the benefits from the jQuery UI widget factory that are not available in the plugin version. The most requested feature was the ability to call methods on instances after initialization (e.g., statefullness), and now there are 10 to choose from! Also present are eight events you can bind to, which in the previous version, had fewer and limited support. Finally, there is support for effects. Just include the jQuery UI effects dependency and specify the name of the opening or closing effect to use (and speed, if you wish!)

• Current version: 1.3 (07/08/2010 – changelog)
• View demos
• Download source or minified, and the CSS file.
• Follow this project on GitHub
• Run unit tests

Demo

See what you’re missing out on? Many more demos are available here.

The code behind this demo:

$("#multiselect-demo").multiselect({
   show:"blind",
   hide:"blind",
   selectedText:"# of # selected"
});