The jquery picklist plugin only seems to work if the value of the options in the select are numeric e.g.
<select>
<option value="1">Value 1</option>
<option value="2">Value 2</option>
</select>
as opposed to:
<select>
<option value="one">Value 1</option>
<option value="two">Value 2</option>
</select>
Is there an alternative or workaround to this that doesn’t involve changing the objects populated in the list to have a numeric property?
This was a known bug that has been fixed. As of version 0.9.0, the jquery-picklist widget supports non-numeric option values. Update to the latest version for the fix.
See the Non-Numeric Values Test for a demonstration of non-numeric values.