LightBox, ThickBox & Framework Conflicts

October 25th, 2007 Posted by Don Albrecht

Lightbox & CodaSlider aren’t compatible. A situation that was brought to my attention while participating in the comments on a blog post at http://www.ndoherty.com/. Conflicts like this are a common experience for many of us and I thought this was a good opportunity to explore the cause of one such conflict.

In the case of Lightbox & CodaSlider, the fundamental frameworks were at odds with each other. Lightbox is built with the Prototype / Scriptaculous framework stack, CodaSlider uses the jQuery framework. Superficially, this doesn’t seem like a big deal. While it’s usually bad form to load down a web page with multiple frameworks, I know it’s a crime many of us have been guilty of in the name of expediency or through multiple vendor integrations. Usually this works, but in this case, the developer was attempting to integrate two widgets that were instantiated at different times and by different methods.

Luckily, there’s a simple solution to the problem. I directed her towards the popular “ThickBox” widget instead. In fact, that’s the greatest strength of the Ajax Bestiary we all have at our disposal. There’s usually another tool available for us to use and in the case of popular frameworks like jQuery, a native solution is out there. So if you ever find yourself in this situation, try to find the native solution.