ffffrozen - Adam Bezulski's blog

Recently lighboxes (or modal overlays as you want) have gained popularity, mostly because of JS frameworks. They are quite easy to setup and come with some options and predefined styles.

Despite the fact that some developers try to establish debate (or just have their own thoughts) if modal windows are good or bad, I still see the reason for their usage (I am not thinking about lightboxes strictly for images in this case).

Few days ago I stumbled upon the jQuery plugin lightbox_me. After some testing that I did, it has become my favourite plugin for modal windows. Here is why:

• easy to setup
• very lightweight and doesn't have huge impact on the page load time
• comes with variety of options (styling, behavior, AJAX)
• has no predefined styles at all - this is good when you want to add your own styling
• good for the content loaded via AJAX

This plugin is perfect for web applications (or websites) where usage of lightboxes is limited to certain actions or elements (no images or videos). The missing feature is the ability to display content using the iFrame as you can find in the fancybox plugin, but compared to lighbox_me plugin, the fancybox is more complex.

URLs:

• lightbox_me: http://buckwilson.me/lightboxme/
• fancy box (if you need more with your content): http://fancybox.net/home

Few days ago new jQuery (now in version 1.4) was released. New version comes with updated existing features and there also brand new to version 1.4. The most interesting for me are:

• bind() method - allows you bind multiple events to element in one function;
• attributes passing - now it is possible to pass few attributes as object with its values (all in JSON format of course);
• delay() method - allows to delay the execution of functions in the queue - using that you don't have to use callback functions or setTimeout;

Complete change log can be found on jQuery API page: http://api.jquery.com/category/version/1.4/