Question

So I’ve been stuck for the whole afternoon on this problem which I eventually solved. It turned out I was assigning el instead of $el.

What’s the difference between the two and when should I use each of them?

Answer 1

Straight from the documentation, $el is:

A cached jQuery (or Zepto) object for the view’s element. A handy reference instead of re-wrapping the DOM element all the time.

So, $el is a cached, jQuery (or Zepto) version of el. If you need to use any jQuery or Zepto methods on el, you can simply use $el instead of wrapping el in $() each time.