Review of Greybox (Lightbox clone)

Posted March 6, 2007

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There are a ton of lightbox clones floating out on the web now. It’s funny that I only heard of lightbox late last year, and how much it has exploded. I see it everywhere, and I love it.

The idea of a lightbox is to put the focus on a viewable element, without leaving a page. Usually this is an image that loads on top of the current page, greying out the website behind it using a transparent .png or a transparency style (two different proprietary styles in IE and Firefox).

Although I love lightbox, and all of the transitions, I really want something that uses the transitions with non image content like html pages. I think this could be very useful, as does most of the online community, for login pages and AJAX driven applications. So I started to hunt, and man are there a ton of different options.

The one that I liked the most, seemed to be easily customizable, and changed things just enough to make sense globally for html and images was Greybox.

I struggled with it for half of a day, but fortunately there is a Google user group to post questions to. I didn’t realize that the directory structure could not be organized site wide, but needed to reside relatively within the directory of the page where it would be used.

I had it working, but then I broke it, and once I figure it out in more depth I will continue this entry.