What and why is epiJQuery?

A feature in EPiServer CMS 6 that might catch your eye is a dashboard. An interesting technical aspect of it is that it’s largely a client based solution. As such anyone planning to do their magic on it might have the good fortune to enter the wonderful world of client side scripting (but you can do a lot of things server only if you prefer that).

So, what is epiJQuery? It’s jQuery 1.3.2, with one tiny addtition:

window.epiJQuery = jQuery;

Why is this useful? Consider this seemingly innocuous line anyone could add to the dashboard at any time.

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4/jquery.min.js"></script>

The additional variable epiJQuery ensure that any scripts running after the script include above will find the same jquery version and plugins as the ones running before the script include.