Description:
Plugin that turns linked images into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups. This plugin includes the cool javascript done by Lokesh Dhakar and got transformed into a Wordpress Plugin by me who got inspired by Frank from 2d-sign. Version 0.1 till 0.5 featured Lightbox1. Beginning from version 0.6 it is now featuring Lightbox2.

Last update: Sept 09th, 2008
Latest version: v0.7a (Download)

What is it good for?

It scans your posts for linked images and makes a nice overlay popup out of them. This is much better than linking to a new window or even open a old-school javascript popup. The Lighbox-overlay shows a small preloader animation before showing the full image. Before i continue to talk about what it is, i better show some examples.

Examples

Example Linked Image

Example Linked Series (introduced with v0.6)

Example Text-Linked Image
Click me to watch

How to use the Lightbox2 Series feature?

(v0.6) That is quiet simple. I have used the HTML title tag to make this process as easy as possible. Choose a name for the series and enclose it with braces. See example below - i chose “holiday”:

{holiday} Some Holiday Pic
{holiday} Me and my fam
{holiday} On the road

This will make the script sort all these 3 Pictures into a series, named “holiday”. Everything that comes after the braces will be used as the caption for the image. The part with the braces will be removed so it wont be displayed, or show up in the tooltip. Easy huh? But to make it more clear, here is the HTML:

<a title="{holiday} Me and my fam" href="/images/holidays/fam.jpg" />...
<a title="{holiday} On the road" href="/images/holidays/theroad.jpg" />...

Quite simple :) The Plugin will do the rest. Of course you can leave pictures out. Just dont put the braces part into the title-attribute and those will then become seperate lightboxes.

How to disable the Plugin for a post or page?

(v0.6+) If you don’t want the lightbox plugin affect a specific post, then you simply have to add the following tag somewhere in the text of your post:

##NOLIGHTBOX##

Don’t worry.. this tag will be removed too ;)

How to disable the Plugin for single image?

(v0.6 ONLY) For this we use the braces trick once again. To disable the lightbox on a particular image you have to put the following into the title-attribute. “nolb” as in “no-lightbox”:

{nolb}

It is the same story as if you want to create a series. Since this word is reserved for this functionally keep in mind that you cannot create a series using this keyword. For a non-lightbox plugin you can of course still have a title describing the image. Just append it like you’ve seen in the series example above.

Is it better than others?

I can’t tell. This one here is really for people who know nothing about editing templates or are too lazy to configure plugins with more options than “activate”. The most important thing is that you don’t need to adjust all your posts just to get the Lightbox in older posts. It is all fully automatic - plus this is a singlestep install and a pretty nice addon for almost any blog / design. Just try it for yourself .. it only takes a minute. I mainly made this one for fun and because it was kinda requested.

Okay.. How to Install?

1. Unzip the file to your local hard-drive
2. Upload the extracted folder to your Wordpress plugins folder (/wp-content/plugins/)
3. Activate it and you’re done!

Version History:

Download latest version

Download version 0.7a (zip)

Installation

Download this new version, extract to /wp-content/plugins, activate. Make sure you keep the lightbox folder that is within the zip. Copy the whole folder to the plugins folder. Check out the new Optionspanel in the Adminmenu after you activated the plugin. Enjoy Version 0.7a, released in Sept 2008

Developer?

You can simply clone the current source via Git from the GitHub: Repository.
Comments, Patches, etc.. welcome.