Baraja: A Plugin for Spreading Items in a Card-Like Fashion

From our sponsor: Ship fast and never break a thing with Shortcut (formerly Clubhouse.io).

Baraja is an experimental and fun jQuery plugin that allows to move elements in a card-like fashion and spread them like one would spread a deck of cards on a table. It uses CSS transforms for rotating and translating the items. There are several options available that will create various spreading possibilities of the items, for example, moving the items laterally or rotating them in a fan-like way.

Please note that the CSS transforms and transitions only work in browsers that support them.

For using the plugin, an unordered list with the class “baraja-container” is expected, i.e. in our demo we use:

<ul id="baraja-el" class="baraja-container">
	<li>
		<img src="images/1.jpg" alt="image1"/>
		<h4>Coco Loko</h4>
		<p>Total bicycle rights in blog four loko raw denim ex, helvetica sapiente odio placeat.</p>
	</li>
	<li> <!-- ... --> </li>
	<li> <!-- ... --> </li>
	<li> <!-- ... --> </li>
	<!-- ... --> 
</ul>

The plugin can be called like this:

$( '#baraja-el' ).baraja();

The following is an example of triggering the spreading of the items using Baraja:

$( '#some-button' ).on( 'click', function( event ) {

	baraja.fan( {
		speed : 500,
		easing : 'ease-out',
		range : 90,
		direction : 'right',
		origin : { x : 25, y : 100 },
		center : true,
		translation : 0
	} );

} );

Options

The following default options are available:

// the options
$.Baraja.defaults = {
	// if we want to specify a selector that triggers the next() function. example: '#baraja-nav-next'
	nextEl : '',
	// if we want to specify a selector that triggers the previous() function
	prevEl : '',
	// default transition speed
	speed : 300,
	// default transition easing
	easing : 'ease-in-out'
};

The following methods are available: fan(), next(), previous(), close(), add().

The default setting for the fan method are the following:

this.fanSettings = {
	// speed for opening/closing
	speed : 500,
	// easing for opening/closing
	easing : 'ease-out',
	// difference/range of possible angles that the items will have
	// example: with range:90 and center:false the first item
	// will have 0deg and the last one 90deg;
	// if center:true, then the first one will have 45deg
	// and the last one -45deg; in both cases the difference is 90deg
	range : 90,
	// this defines the position of the first item 
	// (to the right, to the left)
	// and its angle (clockwise / counterclockwise)
	direction : 'right',
	// transform origin:
	// you can also pass a minX and maxX, meaning the left value 
	// will vary between minX and maxX 
	origin : { x : 25, y : 100 },
	// additional translation of each item
	translation : 0,
	// if the cards should be centered after the transform 
	// is applied
	center : true,
	// add a random factor to the final transform
	scatter : false
};

The basic styling is defined in the baraja.css file and you can see an example of customizing the style in custom.css.

The demo contains many examples of spreading possibilities and it also contains a navigation, an example of how to add more items and a close button that will trigger the deck of items to be brought back to their “closed” state. Clicking the first item will also trigger the deck to close. Clicking on an item inside of the deck will make it appear on top of the deck.

Note that depending on how many items you have, they will spread happily according to the parameters set. Because the items are absolute, they will simply overflow, so you might want to make sure that they stay in the viewport. You will be able to see that in some examples in the demo.

Credits: The Dribbble shots used in the demo are from illustrations by talented Jason Custer. View his works on Behance.