HTML5 Boilerplate plugins.js

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That section of the html5boilerplate is sort of an abbreviation of what should/could go there.

You can approach plugins.js a few ways:

  1. Ignore it and include all of your JS plugins as separate files (undesirable)
  2. Manually concatenate and minify the plugin files (this is a pain to maintain)
  3. Use a script to concatenate them (and cache it) at run-time (like this)
  4. Use a makefile to concatenate/compress like a ninja (like this)
  5. Use a slick JS library like yepnope.js to asynchronously load your plugin files as needed.

There’s a lot of options for including your JS plugins…you’ll have to weigh them yourself, of course. I usually use options 3 or 4, though I need to start using 5.

As for what goes in the snippet of code that you gave:

(function($){
  // This is a wrapper for your jQuery stuff 
})(this.jQuery);

You’ll see that block of code wrapping a lot of jQuery plugins (check the docs). It can be used to wrap your jQuery-specific code so you can make use of $ while keeping your site in jQuery compatibility mode…which lets your site play nicely with other libraries that may use $ as well.

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