Was just looking over the features that MediaboxAdvanced has to offer and it’s quite compelling. It’s basically a Lightbox clone but will show you just about anything you can imagine.

I haven’t looked at the code at all, but it’s mechanism for launching is all html based, For example, to launch a google video (see screenshot above), you would do:

<a href=”http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8111235669135653751″
rel=”lightbox[social 640 290]”
title=”video.google.com”>Google video »</a>

I’m not a huge fan of this kind of coding, preferring most of the time to write JavaScript when I need it, but I do have a version of Lightbox in my own libraries. I could just as easily design an overlay popup using my StickyWin classes and my SimpleSlideShow, for example, and sometimes do that. But there are other times when you just want to be able to zoom into an image and see it, and writing a bunch of JS just doesn’t make sense when Lightbox does such a good job of it.

In that spirit I think MediaboxAdvanced outdoes itself. It’s author (John Einselen I think – that’s as best I can tell looking at the page) has gone out of his way to provide support for a myriad of use cases including images, image groups, video (and video groups), iframes, and plain HTML. In some ways it’s a swiss army knife with an overload of tools in it (the script weighs about 24K), but on the other hand, it’s easy to use things like this that can bring new users to a library like MooTools.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 4:29 pm and is filed under 3rd Party Libraries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.