I just came across ColorBox, a customizable lightbox plugin for jQuery. From their site on why you should be using ColorBox:
- Supports photos, photo groups, ajax, inline, and iframed content.
- Appearance is completely controlled through CSS so users can restyle the box.
- Behavior settings can be over-written without altering the ColorBox javascript file.
- Completely unobtrusive, requires no changes to existing HTML
- Degrades gracefully, all content displayed can be accessed without JavaScript.
- Preloads background images to avoid flash of unstyled content on first use.
- Can preload upcoming images in a photo group.
- Lightweight: only 12kbs of JavaScript - only 2kbs gzipped & minified!
- Written in jQuery plugin format and can be chained with other jQuery commands.
- Generates W3C valid XHTML and CSS
- Released under the MIT License.
I have used several different lightbox-style plugins in the past but most of them have felt very clunky. (ThickBox, I’m looking at you…) ColorBox looks like several steps in the right direction.