Lightbox2 Plugin for WordPress
Every now and then you come accross a plugin for WordPress that simply blows you away and you must have it!
Lightbox2 plugin by Kjell Bublitz is one such plugin that turns linked images into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups (Click image for a demo).
It can also be uses a with a group of images to produce an image gallery slide show by simply adding the title in curly brackets like this: {Title of Images} to the title attribute of the image anchor tag.
Even better is that to use it you simply install and it will do everything for you and if your visitor doesn’t have javascript enabled it degrades well and just links to the image as normal.
For a better demo, instructions and download visit the Lightbox2 page on Kjell Bublitz website.
[Edit] I have disabled the plugin as Andreas pointed out to me that the plugin does not produce valid css. I may be able to fix this but it will have to wait as I have other things that I should be doing at the moment.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 9th, 2006 at 2:34 pm and is filed under WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
May 9th, 2006 at 7:54 pm
Yes, I know it. I think it’s more and more popular because I’ve met it on many sites recently. And my Firefox with activated Adblock freezes everytime. Reload the page is the only chance. I have to use Opera for viewing such pages. I don’t know what to change in Firefox.
May 9th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
The plugin is foiled!
Shame about that. It really is a neat way of displaying images. I’ll try that Adblock out and see what it does.
May 9th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
It looks great. But unfortunally, like most cool effects, it is more fun than useful. The addition of linking images together is nice. But the animation is a bit annoying. I wish it could just show the image directly, that would make it nicer.
May 9th, 2006 at 9:25 pm
I suppose it show the animation while the image loads. Once the image is cached it almost loads straight away, but then you probably wouldn’t load the image more than once.
May 9th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
It also has a major problem: It breaks CSS validation by default. Not any big deal for most people, but it makes it worthless to me unless I can manage to make it valid in some way…
May 9th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
That CSS is bad! I hadn’t tried that. I’ll have a look and see why it is so bad.
May 9th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
I have tidied up as much as I can but I don’t think it will get any better.
May 9th, 2006 at 11:08 pm
OK so using Lightbox Plus (Info on same website) I have made it valid css by removing the “filter: Alpha(opacity=50);” from the css file.
It works on Firefox but just leaves a blank background in IE. This one does not support multiple images though.
May 10th, 2006 at 12:07 am
After further playing, it now works on Firefox and IE with valid css. There are no animations either but no multiple images. Opera doesn’t quite get it though. Why do I always have problems with Opera?
May 10th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
Because Opera is Opera. I always get messed up in Opera, don’t know why.
May 11th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
Strange, the plus version in Firefox doesn’t always work. 1 on 2 times that I load an image it just shows the whole image in a new tab. And indeed, it’s a fun plug-in but a bit useless
May 11th, 2006 at 7:53 pm
Yes it is fun and I got carried away with it at first. I have a tendency to do that