An Even Literbox

This post was written 4 years 6 months 14 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

For some time now I’ve been using a great JavaScript utility named Lightbox 2.0. Basically, it displays photos on a web page, but in a very stylish way. You start with a thumbnail, click it, and it expands, the rest of the screen fades out, and with version 2.0, you can then scroll through multiple photos.

If you go to the Lightbox home page, there’s a pretty good demonstration on what it does. I use it on the BMTG site quite a bit, and I’ve used it elsewhere too.

The only problem with it was its use of the Prototype Framework and Scriptaculous Effects Library, which made the whole thing a bit, erm, bulky for what it did.

Now, there is an answer…. Litebox. It’s based on Lightbox 2.0 but it utilizes the 3kb Javacript library moo.fx in association with prototype.lite.

On top of that, Bravenet published their own “theme” for it, making it all look a little swankier.

Well, you can’t keep a good utility down. Just as I used to compress the original Lightbox down to a more managable size, I’ve done the same to Litebox. The result…. Literbox.

What have I done? Well, I’ve compressed the Javascript and CSS. I’ve also compressed and colour reduced some of the images (not that you’d spot the different). It’s saved another 8k. You can download my modded version below, which includes the original demo packaged with it (which I’ve not compressed in any way). There’s also a second package, which is the same thing again but with the Bravenet theme (and again, I’ve compressed the Bravenet changes).

Download Literbox 1.0
Download Literbox 1.0 – Bravenet Theme

Update 1/12/08 – I’ve removed the links to my modified Litebox as I know longer support it. I’ve now moved over to Slimbox, which also uses mootools, but doesn’t require a modified BODY tag (something which was causing me problems).