How to use Thickbox

I have had a lot of hits on my How to use Lytebox post, and I thought I might continue it as a series and do something on another of the light box clones. It also looks like lytebox has been discontinued by the author. I have started to use Thickbox. Why you ask? It uses jQuery, and I am starting to really like that library. One of the things that drew me to lytebox was that it had no dependencies. But now, more sites require javascript anyway, and my library of choice is jQuery. So, if I am using jQuery, why not the Thickbox plugin?

If you are not sure about this library, check out this matrix that lists just about every light box type javascript library around.

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Javascript Speed Tests

As part two of yesterdays Javascript Speed post, I have an interresting link. MooTools, another Javascript library, has a speed comparison page up here. I had looked at MooTools a while back when I put up the slideshow piece on the front page of the site. I didn’t look into it too much, but it seemed small and compact. Anyway, the speed comparison is interresting. If you go to the site, press the “start tests” button in the upper right to see the differences. I got here while I was looking into jQuery. Prototype gets smacked in the speed test. Yikes.

This post is from 2007, but was already complaining that WordPress was going to use Prototype instead of jQuery for version 2.0. (which was just released a month ago) It would appear to me though that WordPress went and switched to jQuery. Looking at the WordPress docs, I found this page on AJAX, and it talks about jQuery.  When I look at the source of one of the admin pages, there is jQuery references all over, but nothing about prototype.

Looks like WordPress has switched to jQuery, and if I am looking at making plugins for wordpress, I might want to think about moving to jQuery.