Recently at work we looked at some JavaScript apps that create nice-looking pop-up windows, which replace the boring old pop-ups that you see all over the Net. In particular, we looked at Greybox and Thickbox, both based on Lightbox. Whenever I see something neat like this in one of our team meetings, I look for a way to add it to my own bag of tricks. This is one one instance (of many) where I failed miserably.

I looked at two Wordpress plugins that would facilitate the use of the ‘boxes. Both written by the same developer, the Greybox WP plugin and the Thickbox WP plugin looked like an extremely simple way to add a little bit of flair to this site. I was wrong.

At first, Thickbox worked okay on anything that wasn’t a PHP file, which made it largely worthless to me as I wanted to display images from the gallery in a pop-up (you may notice that they all end in the PHP extension, not in JPGs as one would expect). I made my own edits, then some based on the work done by posters on the Thickbox developer’s site. At some point, I broke the plugin beyond repair, and nothing would appear anymore.

I moved on to Greybox. The developer demonstrates on his site how practically any file can be opened, so I would have no issues based on the extension of the file. Assuming it would meet my needs nicely, I went ahead with it. With this ‘box, I never got the anything to appear in the pop-up. I saw a flash of the Greybox, but then the page loaded in the browser without opening the pop-up.

I think I wasted enough time on these ‘boxes. Feel free to head over to one of the links above and see how they look when they work correctly.

Edit: Corrected spelling mistake. Also, I just wanted to say that I was not trying to say anything negative about any of the code that I linked to. The issue is solely on my part; I screwed something up.