Robert Neu

Hey there,

WP Featherlight should automatically find any image that’s linking directly to an image file, regardless of whether or not it’s in a post. Can you share a link or some example code so I can help figure out why it’s not working as expected for you?

Thanks!

Hey Markus,

Unfortunately that would fall outside the scope of what the plugin is intended to do. It’s possible that it could be done in an add-on plugin, but we have no plans to build one at this point in time.

Thanks!

– Rob

Hi janonla,

Thanks! It looks like you’ve figured this one out already on your test site. Captions should be handled automatically when they’re added to your images in the WordPress admin.

The output bellow the thumbnails is handled by your theme, so if you run into any issues there it’ll probably be best to reach out to the theme developer.

If you’d like to style the captions under the lightboxed image, you can do so by targeting the .featherlight-content .caption selector in your CSS.

Hope that helps!

Hey stigekalder,

We definitely do test the plugin with all major releases of WordPress, but before you posted this I had been incorrectly bumping the “tested up to” version of the plugin. The WordPress repository’s instructions were to bump the version in SVN’s “trunk”, but apparently that’s incorrect when you have tagged a latest version of the plugin within SVN.

I’ve corrected the issue and you should see that it’s now reflecting the test up to the latest version of core. Thanks for pointing out the problem!

– Rob

Hey Raincheck,

It looks like your theme might be missing the wp_footer() function in the footer. Without that, the Featherlight JavaScript isn’t being loaded and it won’t be able to work.

If you add wp_footer(); to your theme footer just before the closing </body> tag, the plugin should be able to work as-expected.

Can either of you provide a link to a site where prettyPhoto has been disabled and WP Featherlight is activated but not working? If I can see what the actual issue is I may be able to offer more insight.

If not, the only way I can debug is to test using a copy of Visual Composer on a local site, which I can definitely try but it may take me a while to get to it.

Hi,

Once prettyPhoto has been disabled, you shouldn’t need to do anything else to lightbox images on the site. If you’re looking to lightbox other content, you’d need to add data attributes to the things that you want to lightbox.

The full listing of data attributes can be found on their GitHub documentation and here’s an example of lightboxing a video on one of our theme demos.

Hope that helps!

Hey Dave,

Unfortunately, the way the alt text is defined is part of the core featherlight jQuery script and not something we can really do much about without significant modification or writing additional code to integrate alt text into the image.

That said, I really don’t think this is an SEO issue. The featherlight lightbox image is a clone of images embedded in your content and only one of them ever exists at any given moment. It’s dynamically generated when someone clicks on one of your images to open the lightbox.

As long as you have the proper alt text in your in-content images, you should be fine from an SEO perspective.

SEO aside, this could be seen as a bit of an accessibility problem, so I’ll open an issue on the featherlight script to discuss it with the guy who maintains it.

If the script does get changed, we’ll make sure the latest version is pulled in to WP Featherlight as well.

Hey Collin,

Hmm… that’s a tough one. We’ve run into issues with the file extensions being triggered incorrectly in URLs and that issue will be solved on the next update, but the link on your post would still fail.

The way the automatic image linking works depends on the link string ending in the file extension, so when a link ends in one and doesn’t actually link to a file it creates a problem.

I’m not sure how much of an edge case this is. It seems like it’s probably fairly uncommon, but I’ll see if there’s any way we can address it before the next update rolls out.

Hello!

This is happening because of how we’re getting the caption text from within the post. I actually didn’t even realize that WordPress allowed HTML to be added to captions, so it’s just an oversight on my part.

I’ll work on adding support for links and other HTML elements on the next version update.

Bradhar,

Ah, there have been a few other users who have run into this. That plugin isn’t really necessary anymore now that WordPress has built HTML5 support into the galleries. As far as I know, it’s been semi-deprecated by Justin.

If you disable it and add the following to your theme’s functions.php file, you should have the HTML5 galleries you’re after and the lightbox will work properly with them:

add_theme_support( 'html5', array( 'gallery', 'caption' ) );

The reason cleaner gallery doesn’t work is it uses a different class for the captions than WordPress core does. On the one hand, we could add support for it, on the other it’s adding extra JS to our plugin to support something that isn’t really necessary anymore so at this point I’ve elected not to do it.

I hope that helps!

Hey Bradhar,

The reason you’re running into that issue is that the plugin doesn’t use alt tags for captions. It uses the WordPress caption system, which should be a more reliable way for captions to be displayed only when you want them.

Here’s some information on how the WordPress caption system works. If you add some captions to your images, you should see that they appear in the lightbox as well.

Hey Kathatp,

Unless you’re using a plugin or theme that modifies the default WordPress caption system, that class should definitely still exist.

You can see it in use on our recent WordPress White Screen of Death post.

The code we use to handle the captions is similar to that, but adding captions using alt text would make them display for every image on the site, which would be a really strange experience for most users. If you’d like to implement that code yourself, you should be able to add it in a custom JS file within your theme.

Hope that helps!

idejasi,

The conflict is coming from Visual Composer. You’ll need to disable the lightbox in Visual Composer in order to use Featherlight.

I checked through their documentation and didn’t see anything that explains how to disable it, so you might want to reach out to their support and ask them what needs to be done.

If there’s a way to programmatically disable it we could look at integrating that into a future update of WP Featherlight.

Hi idejasi,

WordPress doesn’t have a default lightbox on the front end, so the extra one must be coming from either your theme or another plugin.

Can you provide a link to your site so I can take a look?