99% of the way to getting a Lightbox caption link to work… - lightbox

Question

...or that's how it feels at least :)
I know similar Lightbox link questions have been asked before but I'm not sure they applied exactly to my situation. I am trying to set it up so that a link in the Lightbox title/caption opens the full size image. In other words, on my page, I have a thumbnail, then if I click on that, it opens a detail (in Lightbox), then below that Lightbox popup would be some text, and a link to view an even larger image (ideally as a Lightbox popup.) I have read a bunch of other threads and followed the instructions to change the <> to html values, etc. and I think I'm nearly there, but it's not quite working. The link is showing up properly in my code, and I get a finger pointer when I hover over the link, but for some reason nothing happens when I click it. I can right click and open the link in new window, and that works, but apparently something (in the Lightbox code?) is preventing it from working on the page.
I guess what I'm wondering is:
Is this possible?
Is it relatively simple (I have no experience with Javascript/Jquery…)
Is it possible to have a link in a Lightbox popup open another Lightbox popup?
Is there an option other than Lightbox that will allow this (Colorbox? Slimbox?)
Here is my code so far:
<img src="<?php echo $image->url() ?>" width="<?php echo $image->width() ?>" height="<?php echo $image->height() ?>" alt="<?php echo $image->name() ?>" />
Here is an example of how it's outputting:
<div class="item" style="width: 194px; margin: 3%;">
<img src="http://www.chrissvensson.info/ces85/content/035-035/DSC_3335.jpg" width="194" height="300" alt="DSC_3335" /></div>
Just to clarify, I am using Lightbox 2.5.1 (http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/lightbox2/)
Thanks so much for any help you might be able to provide. And again, I apologize if this has been answered before…

Answer 1

It's quite hard to tell exactly what you've got so far without you posting a little more of your code, but I can try to go through a couple of the very basics of what you need to do.
Firstly, most lightbox style plugins are based on jQuery, which means you're going to run some javascript code on the client side.
Your PHP will generate the static content which gets everything set up, then you need to run the jQuery plugin which will do lots of magic and convert it into a lightbox. As you didn't mention which plugin you're using I'll go with fancybox, as I think it has a lot of nice options: http://fancybox.net/howto. I won't go through all the boring set up details as they're already on the site, but here's the two most important bits:
you need to set up an image, encapsulated by a link, like the example given. Your PHP should dynamically generate this, similar to what you've done already.
<a id="image_id" href="image_big.jpg"><img src="image_small.jpg" alt=""/></a>
Before any javascript, it's just a thumbnail of the image (image_small.jpg) that links through to the full sized one (image_big.jpg)
Now to make this actually work, you need to point the javascript plugin at the link you just made.
I would advise you read through some basic jQuery documentation or tutorials like this one, as you'll find the library really useful, but long story short, to select an element by id in jquery, you would use this: $('#image_id').
All you need to do then, is run fancybox on this link when the plugin loads:
$('#image_id').fancybox();
The best place to put this is within jQuery's $(document.ready(function(){/*your code in here*/}) which is call when the page is loaded.
With fancybox, to add a caption/title when the window opens, you just need to add a caption="caption here" attribute into the <a> anchors that you create.
Regarding your question about a lightbox popup within a lightbox popup, it is entirely possible, but you'd have to do a little bit of extra javascript wizardry. My advice would be to consider the user experience and find an alternative (perhaps just allow the user to download the massive image, or look for plugins that allow you to zoom in to something), because opening two modal dialogues sounds quite confusing for the user!
Anyway, hope this helps.