The Lightbox Lowdown (Global Moxie)

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Global Moxie is the hypertext laboratory of Josh Clark, a designer, developer, and author who offers workshops and consulting for iPhone app design. He’s also creator of Big Medium, a web content management system. Josh spins words and code from multimedia studios in Providence, RI, and Paris, France.

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The Lightbox Lowdown

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Posted May 22, 2007 (updated Jun 13, 2007)

I’ve been working today on improving Big Medium’s “lightbox” slideshow feature for browsing image galleries.

Up ’til now, you could navigate forward and back through the slideshow by clicking on the image itself; clicking on the left side of the image took you back, and clicking right took you forward.

Alas, while visually elegant, this navigation was far too hidden. It wasn’t visible until you actually hovered over the image, when a forward or back arrow appeared above the image. I received consistent feedback that site visitors took a long time to figure it out, if ever.

Before: Navigation was visible only when hovering over the image.

After: Navigation is always visible above the image.

Today I updated my development version of Big Medium to move this navigation above the slideshow images. The forward/back arrows are now always visible, making it much clearer how to navigate through the gallery.

Another new slideshow nicety is that clicking anywhere outside of the slideshow now makes it go away. In the past, you had to click the little “X” close box at the bottom of the image to dismiss the slideshow. That’s still an option, but adding this additional new method makes it easier to get back to the page when you’re done browsing the gallery.

Other recent changes elsewhere in Big Medium include a handful of bug fixes and some significant performance improvements to Big Medium’s JavaScript libraries, which makes the interface a bit peppier.

All of these changes will be part of the next beta update, which I expect to update sometime before the end of the month.

Before I release that update, though, I plan to add one more significant feature: the ability to limit editing privileges of individual accounts to only certain sections of a site. Currently all accounts have permission to add content to any portion of a site. The new feature will give webmasters and admins the option to constrain any account to specific sections. I’ll be digging into that feature this week.

Stay tuned, there’s more to come!

Tags: bigmedium, lightbox

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Comments

4 comment(s) on this page: Add your own comment below.

Tom

May 23, 2007 9:30am [ 1 ]

Luuuuuvely. Looking forward to the update! Till now I've been setting the slideshow arrows to always show, and the timing for the section-specific editing couldn't be better. Site cloning and one-click editing - we're soooo close! Dear I say a month or two?

Josh

May 23, 2007 11:41am [ 2 ]

Glad you like! Yep, we're getting close.... a month or two seems about right for the release of Big Medium 2.0 if all goes well.

anton

Oct 26, 2007 3:07pm [ 3 ]

hi great idea ..... i was look for some thing lik this all the time ... if you finished you lightbox navigation fix ..could you informe me ... thnax alot

anton

Josh

Oct 28, 2007 4:11pm [ 4 ]

Hi Anton,

Yes indeed, the change has already been incorporated into Big Medium 2, which uses a modified version of lightbox. You can check it out here.

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