Ajax and PHP: Building Modern Web Applications, 2nd Ed. (Review)

Photo by Mike Johnston - http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikejsolutions/3078513728/

Just found this long overdue review of Ajax and PHP: Building Modern Web Applications – Second Edition sitting in a drafts folder – looks like I never published it. (Full disclosure – Packt sent me a review copy).

This is the successor to the wildly popular Ajax and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications, which came out back in 2005. The authors of this edition are Bogdan Brinzarea-Iamandi, Christian Darie, and Audra Hendrix. (Brinzarea-Iamandi was also one of the authors of the first edition).

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jQuery, Thickbox, and WordPress

Photo by Daniel Morrison - http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielmorrison/4106439044/

So in this new theme for Open Parenthesis, I really wanted a lightbox / thickbox type effect on local images. This means that when the user clicks on the smaller images used inside blog posts, the “view larger” version is presented in a nice javascript modal dialogue box, with the rest of the page darkened. It’s a common effect you’ve likely seen on many blogs, and there are some plugins which do this, but I wanted it built in to the theme.

I found this post – Create Thickbox in WordPress With Just 3 Lines of Code – which seemed (and was) promising, but had to customize a bit for how I use images – basically to avoid applying the thickbox effect on images which are linked to external sites.

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