how to use jquery with primefaces

PrimeFaces already ships with jQuery bundled, yet you've downloaded and installed another one which would only conflict with PrimeFaces bundled jQuery. I'm sure that if you have paid a bit more attention and love to the webbrowser's builtin JavaScript console, you would have seen JS errors.

You need to remove the following line:

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-1.7.1.min.js"></script>

On pages which do not necessarily use PrimeFaces components, jQuery won't be automatically included, you'd then need to explicitly load its bundled jQuery by a proper

<h:outputScript>

.

<h:outputScript library="primefaces" name="jquery/jquery.js" />

Note that using

<h:outputScript>

does not end up in a duplicate script include on pages which actually use PrimeFaces components.