Getting JQuery UI working with Drupal 6.x

After several attempts, I believe that I have a pretty good system/process for getting jquery ui to work with drupal 6.x.  So I guess it's time to share :)

1. Check Current Jquery Version.
2. Update Jquery with Jquery Update Module
3. Download Jquery UI Module
4. Download the support files for the Jquery UI Module
5. Enable the Jquery UI Module

I would first check and make sure your current version of jquery is working/running on the site, as this entire process (which I have done several times for both fun and work) has worked best for me if I do each step in turn, then verity what I have done...

for checking to see what jquery version you are working with, I prefer to just firebug the doc, and check in the header.  We can see that this site is using jquery 1.2.6 which comes with drupal.

Download and install jquery_update module. (I would suggest the 2.0 version).  At the time of this posting the link is http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/jquery_update-6.x-2.0-alpha1.tar.gz
I will be doing this from the command line and using drush...

then verifying my results...

Now that we have version 1.3.2 of jquery, we can use Jquery UI version 1.7.x for our site. My method for getting the jquery ui files installed differs a little from the readme.txt, it's just how I prefer to do it.... you should read it and decide for yourself.

I start by getting the module into the directory.
drush dl jquery_ui
then head to that directory (cd sites/all/modules/jquery_ui)
make a new directory called jquery.ui (remember this one is ".ui", I mistakenly used "_" and got myself very confused once"
inside this jquery.ui directory we need to get jquery.ui from the source (wget http://jqueryui.com/download/jquery-ui-1.7.3.custom.zip)
the files that are now in the development-bundle folder, need to be in the /jquery.ui folder, then you can delete the development-bundle folder and the zip file.

This should be all you need to make this module ready to enable.
If you see an error, most likely you have not set up the directory structure correct.

Next Post.... testing and using this new Jquery library for yourself.