Properly including a jQuery Plugin

Hey, so i’ve spent far too much time trying to get this to work today, and i’m on my wits end.

I’m trying to use “maphilight” jQuery plugin on my wordpress site, which essentially is supposed to detect when you’ve got an image-map on the page, and make the selection highlighted upon mouse-over, giving it some interactivity.

I set up a demo of the jquery plugin in about 3 minutes using dreamweaver, but when i tried to port it over to my WP site, I can’t get it working the same even after 3 hours.

I’ve basically followed every available walkthrough on how to “properly include jquery” in WP, and how / where to put your custom js scripts and such. But alas, no success thus far.

Odd thing is, with firebug, in the scripts area it detects the plugin, and its contents ( same with jquery ) so i know it’s not that.

In the error console it says that jQuery is not defined ( I changed “$” to “jQuery” as per peoples advice in these forums ) and $ is invalid.

This plugin is remarkably simple, I just wish the application of it was simple as well, I need to have this up and running before the end of tomorrow, as it’s for my work, and I’m completely out of ideas.

Can somebody please point me in the right direction, and clear this up for me, actually give me a concise, yet basic walkthrough on how to accomplish this, because I feel as if I’m just missing a certain step, or doing something in the wrong order.

Please WP support, help me out, I’ve got nowhere else to go, and I can’t possibly waste any more time trouble-shooting this myself, as I’m clearly getting nowhere.