Ok, after spending some time tinkering around with this plugin I have some things for consideration for those looking to incorporate it into their own WP installation. If you don’t use captions then this doesn’t apply, but if you do and want the captions to look better… this is for you!
1) The plugin is using TEMPLATEPATH on line 106 of lightbox-gallery.php, which means it won’t look inside your child theme directory, if you happen to be using a child theme (which is the proper way to be modding a theme in the first place — and something all plugin authors should be expecting!). I hope the author of this plugin changes this in a future version to instead use the stylesheetpath or some other method (there are several others) to look first for the child theme directory, before looking at the parent theme directory. This would be a great improvement and allow overriding of the default css more efficiently. One could easily change this on line 106 but you’d be losing that mod the moment you upgrade (if this author ever upgrades this plugin?).
2) The workaround for me, because I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time, was to over ride the CSS using my child theme’s CSS. All i wanted to do was to fix the caption area — which is smooshed in between and behind the previous/next buttons — due to the author using ABSOLUTE positioning in the default styling. I’d recommend changing this behavior in future versions. It makes more sense to have the caption visible to the user in the lightbox, since you are allowing the user to “flip” through photos with the previous/next buttons. The captions are visible on the gallery images in the post… and in the lightbox they are smooshed behind the buttons and look awful, but if you make these simple changes you can improve upon this plugin like I did. Enough chatter… here’s what I did along with a photo where you can see the end results.
/* for the lightbox plugin, we have to override some css values to show the caption area properly */
#cboxTitle {
color: #fff !important;
font-weight: bold !important;
bottom: 28px !important;
right: 0px !important;
left: 0px !important;
background: #084A7C !important;
opacity: 0.7;
filter: alpha(opacity = 70);
padding: 10px 5px !important;
overflow: hidden !important;
width: auto !important;
}
Just add that to your custom css file and it will over ride the default styling. It simply raises the caption area from where it currently is and applies a nice transparency, background color and auto sizes the width to look good at the bottom of the image. I added extra !important to make sure no future changes over ride this in my theme. Here’s a photo of the improvement. I like the new caption area a lot and i tested it with different size caption text. Maybe the author can include something like this in a future version. It would be a nice addition. Don’t you think?
See the photo with better captions
You can probably make more improvements on this, if you do I’d like to hear about it. I was in a hurry and this worked great for me. If there’s a better or easier way, chime in! Thanks to the author for making this plugin, its still a good simple plugin that does what I wanted and still saved me some time. ??
