JQuery UI Datepicker, reverse the order of the year in the dropdowns

I think the best way to hack the plugin without ripping it is assigning a event handler to the year select item.

//Hack for reverting year order
$(document.body).delegate('select.ui-datepicker-year', 'mousedown', function() {
  (function(sel) {
    var el = $(sel);
    var ops = $(el).children().get();
    if ( ops.length > 0 && $(ops).first().val() < $(ops).last().val() ) {
      $(el).empty();
      $(el).html(ops.reverse());
    }
  })(this);
});

This code must work fine! :P

There is a "way" to get the year started from the last date:

dateFormat: 'mm/dd/yy',
changeMonth: true, 
changeYear: true,  
yearRange: "-70:", 
maxDate: "-13Y"

Instead if using yearRange as fixed years yearRange: "1900:-13" it's better to use this from bottom up: "-70:", and set the maxDate. Now I get my year select box starting from 2004 and not 1900.

P.S: All the other solutions have been tested. They are very slow, and some don't work so well (especially the old ones - sets current year instead of 2004 for example).

I have an answer to you, but it's not exactly what you may want to hear.

After searching the internet for a solution that would reverse the order of the years in the dropdown, I have come to this:

{
    changeMonth: true
    , changeYear: true
    , yearRange: '-65:'
    , maxDate: '1999/12/31'
}

This will have the maxdate preselected, and therefore choosing a year you will automatically see the last entry, thereby being able to scroll up to choose an earlier date.

Edit: yearRange is added arbitrarily, to create a starting point 65 years ago. maxDate is also chosen arbitrarily, as a date 12 years prior to writing this comment. Basically this menu will allow someone to choose an age between 12 and 65 years.

It's not ideal, but it works well enough.

I wouldn't recommend editing the original ui.datepicker.js as Cuong suggested because your changes will be lost as soon as you or another developer replaces the file when a new version is released. Remembering what customisations have been made in order to re-apply is not practical. Instead, you can override the existing _generateMonthYearHeader method in your own separate JS like so:

// store original so we can call it inside our overriding method
$.datepicker._generateMonthYearHeader_original = $.datepicker._generateMonthYearHeader;

$.datepicker._generateMonthYearHeader = function(inst, dm, dy, mnd, mxd, s, mn, mns) {
  var header = $($.datepicker._generateMonthYearHeader_original(inst, dm, dy, mnd, mxd, s, mn, mns)),
      years = header.find('.ui-datepicker-year');

  // reverse the years
  years.html(Array.prototype.reverse.apply(years.children()));

  // return our new html
  return $('<div />').append(header).html();
}

I just wrote this for something I'm working on and it does the trick nicely :)