jQuery was first released in 2006. Nearly 5 years later, it’s still going strong – due largely in part to the community that’s been built up around it. This community of developers constantly releases plugins that allow web developers to easily add amazing functionality to their projects.

Continuing our “Best of 2011? series, the focus this week is on jQuery plugins. Over the past eleven months we’ve seen a lot of great new plugins being released, which made choosing our favorites extremely difficult.

FitText makes font-sizes flexible. Use this plugin on your fluid or responsive layout to achieve scalable headlines that fill the width of a parent element.

FlexSlider is an awesome, fully responsive jQuery slider plugin. In other words, it resizes to fit the screen on which it is displayed, and looks good doing it.

Sausage is a jQuery UI widget for contextual pagination. It complements long or infinite-scrolling pages by keeping the user informed of her location within the document.

Arbor is a graph visualization library built with web workers and jQuery. Rather than trying to be an all-encompassing framework, arbor provides an efficient, force-directed layout algorithm plus abstractions for graph organization and screen refresh handling.

Mosaic automatically generates sliding boxes & captions, allows slide & fade animations with custom directions, and preloads images within boxes.