Joomla 1.6 jQuery instead of Mootools, Core, Caption

After a lengthy and fruitless pursuit through Javascript control plugins and various discussion threads, I took a gander at the function setHeadData in the class JDocumentHTML.

Presumably, you're reading this because you want to streamline your J1.6 app.

Given this, what I was able to conclude is that if you want to cleanly remove those hefty Mootools libs, you have to pass something to the function.

That is, passing a NULL array as the params for 'scripts' to setHeadData won't work.  You'll get a forward slash for an src param in a superfluous script tag.  Alternatively, some discussions will try to tell you passing empty strings will work ... but they don't have error/notifications turned on.

So, you could pass an src to a 0kb (empty) js file.  Or, for me, I passed jQuery:

In the top of your template's index.php:

// replace default scripts with jQuery
// load jQuery instead
$headers = array(
  'scripts' => array(
    $this->baseurl . "/templates/" . // directory of templates
    $this->template .  // 'this' template
    "/js/" .  // folder for javascript files
    "jquery-1.6.1.min.js"  // filename
   => array(
      'mime' => 'text/javascript',  // 'type'
      'defer' => NULL,
      'async' => NULL)
    )
  );
$this->setHeadData($headers);


HEAD before the change:

<script src="/media/system/js/core.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="/media/system/js/mootools-core.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="/media/system/js/caption.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="/media/system/js/mootools-more.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

HEAD after the change:

<script src="/templates/templatename/js/jquery-1.6.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Bob's Yer Uncle.