Outstanding

  • The site I manage for an art gallery depends heavily on features of this plugin I have found nowhere else. The gallery hosts one or two monthly shows IRL. I use images of the art to create online shows. The online pages consist of a set of separate <img/> elements. The excellence of this plugin comes from two features. I can group those images into a single lightbox using the rel attribute to manually group the images together. Each image in the lightbox gets a caption constructed dynamically from custom metadata and stored in the alt image attribute, thanks to the option to allow getting the lightbox title from the thumbnail alt attribute. Note that the thumbnails are not all scrunched together the way they are in most gallery plugins. I have total control over the thumbnail layout and at the same time, the plugin gathers all the images together in a single group. This is most excellent.

    Unfortunately, the two features of the plugin I most rely on are not available in the “Pro” version, which has become just like every other gallery plugin, a tight cluster of unlabeled images. As much as I like the advanced features of the Pro lightbox, the developers have made it impossible for me to take advantage of them.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author FirelightWP

    (@firelightwp)

    Nice review. Thank you!

    On your point about the pro lightbox not doing everything you need, I’d love to ensure that it does. Ideally, the pro lightbox should do *everything* the free ones can do, plus the extra stuff it does.

    As is, the pro lightbox is only a month old, and will be getting very active dev attention in the coming months/years. So feedback and feature requests are very welcome!

    Based on your note, I *think* that the features you are needing are:
    * group images based on rel attribute
    * get and display image title based the thumbnail alt attribute

    Is that right?

    The ‘use alt as title’ setting is something I’m already working on. I think that will likely be in the next release. I would think we could also include gallery grouping based on rel attribute.

    On a broader note, I must admit that when creating the pro lightbox, I just assume most people are now adding galleries/images via the block editor rather than (a) short codes or (b) html. It sounds like you may be using html.

    I need to review things and make sure you have the same flexibility in crafting html that can be digested and used by the pro lightbox, and also be sure that is all in the documentation.

    Thread Starter tslarkin

    (@tslarkin)

    You have my concerns just about right. I rarely need manually grouping by rel attribute; usually automatically grouping of all images works, but this seems to mean that rel based grouping is activated automatically.

    My technique works through a shortcode that carries a list of the attachment ids of the images. The shortcode triggers PHP code that constructs the HTML for the page based on metadata from Advanced Custom Fields. You are probably right that not many of your users are creating pages using the classic text editor and relying on PHP to construct the HTML.

    I’m not allowed to provide a link, but if you were to use your imagination on “soagithaca dot org slash jul-2024”, you might get a better idea of what I’m doing. I’ve been using FancyBox in this way for four years. Easy FancyBox allows me outstanding, maybe even unique, control over the presentation of the images.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • You must be logged in to reply to this review.