jQuery Lightbox

Posted on July 28th, 2007 | No Comments »

Looking for an alternative to lightbox written in jQuery? I’m a fan of the lightbox library, but i’m not as big a fan of the fact that it uses prototype & script.aculo.us. They’re both great libraries, but they’re both kind of bloated, and I much prefer the stylings of jQuery over prototype. I’ve been hunting for an alternative that uses jQuery or one that is even self contained.

I’ve experimented with Thickbox, but it didn’t impress me the same way lightbox did. What I was looking for, was esentially a clone, or a rework of the lightbox library using jQuery, so that it would offer the exact same features, but work with my javascript library of choice. So, of course, I did what any programmer would do when they can’t find what they’re looking for. I wrote it myself :)

Basically, all i’ve done so far is to get lightbox to work, but nothing much beyond that point. In the coming days, i’d like to rewrite as much of it as possible to make use of functionality jQuery offers. I also have a few ideas for some features i’d like to add in. So, included with this post is a copy of Lightbox.js that will work with jQuery. It’s still mostly original lightbox code that I didn’t write, so all of the original author’s remarks and license notices are still in tact. The next copy I include will be all of my own work, and will probably be under a new name.

In any case, here is the code. Enjoy!

*UPDATE*
There’s already a new code release, which you can see here, or you can look at the first version below.

jquery-lightbox-0.1.zip