jQuery Forum

Unless you need each file individually, you can pretty much ignore the js and css in the development-bundle folder. All the js you need is in the top-level /js folder. All the css you need is in the top-level /css folder.

The development-bundle folder has 3 main purposes:
1. provide all individual files that were combined into single files (as well as a few extras like /external and i18n) in case people need them individually
2. provide full offline demos and documentation of all selected components
3. provide an environment for doing development of jQuery UI with individual uncompressed files in the same file and folder structure as our source code repo

Most production users will be satisfied by the top-level /js and /css folders and maybe cherry-picking a file or two out of development-bundle where needed. Oh, and the demos and docs are nice :)

To answer each of your questions:

1. Can I delete the development-bundle/themes/base folder?

Yes.

The ui-lightness folder is an entire standalone theme. Same as the one in the root /css except it also contains each individual css file. The base folder is also an entire standalone theme. If you download the whole themes pack it will contain a themes directory with 21 subfolders, one for each theme. Each has all individual css files as well as a single combined css file. Each also has an images sub-folder which the css references.

The base theme is used as a base for all other themes (hence the name). It's included in the development bundle in case someone wants to create a custom theme on top of our base in the same way ThemeRoller does, by search-and-replace of default values marked by css comments containing variable name tokens. Other than that, it's identical to the smoothness theme.

Base is also the theme we base all development on top of. This gets back to the development-bundle folder matching the folder structure of how we do development, so that's another reason it's included.

2. Can I delete the development-bundle/external folder?

Sure, if you don't need anything in it. You'll want bgiframe so select boxes don't show through dialogs (and other absolute positioned elements) in IE. You'll want cookie if you're going to use the tabs cookie option. Metadata is handy (see http://plugins.jquery.com/project/metadata), but if you don't use it, delete it. QUnit is included in /external (as opposed to /tests) as it is used for all out unit tests but comes from a separate (external) code repository. If you're not going to write or run unit tests, you don't need it.

3. If I want to use minified, then can I delete the non-minified files?

Yes, if you only want the minified files, the minified folder is for you and you don't need any unminified files.

There needs to be some decent documentation about the specifics in what folders or files you need at the minimum for jQuery UI when pushing this to production

I guess this is the closest start we have:

http://jqueryui.com/docs/Getting_Started

We could add a mention there of what the development-bundle folder is and whether you might care, but any further detail would need to go somewhere else, as it's not really on-topic for that page.

Thanks a lot.  Can we copy and paste your reply into a FAQ on some page!  it's great.

So one last thing, the  jQuery | js folder has both a jquery-ui-1.8.1.custom.min.js file AND jQuery 1.4.  I assume if I'm already referencing jQuery 1.4 from some other directory that this is redudant and I can delete that in the js folder.

And then  jquery-ui-1.8.1.custom.min.js is just the jQueryUI with or without the options I specified in the jQueryUI download page.

I'm also going to move the themes folder out into our own css folder.  Then just make sure I'm pointing to that new location of the theme.  I suppose that's fine.

And I'd like to get rid of the development bundle folder as a node...and just move the external folder out somewhere...I'm not sure if all code is dependent on that external folder being in that default location or not.  Basically I'm wondering if there are any inner file dependencies that are pointing to certain file directories within the jQuery folder.  I did a search and I really don't see any ...so seems like all these folders are completely independent of each other and you just need to make sure you're referencing the right files..wherever you decide to put or rearrange any of the folders in the jQuery folder.