Shadowbox.js is a modal media viewer application that enables web content to be displayed in an interface overlaid on the originating page.

The concept of Shadowbox is not a new one, the author Michael J. I. Jackson says, “Shadowbox was inspired by Lokesh Dhakar’s Lightbox and Kevin Miller’s LightWindow.” We’ve not used LightWindow ourselves but we have used Lightbox and, more often than not, Cody Lindley’s Thickbox.

Part of the reason we use Thickbox so much is our early adoption of Ubercart, an exciting, open source e-commerce suite for Drupal (Thickbox is recommended as an optional module within the Ubercart documentation).

Looking over the demos of Shadowbox I was very impressed and immediately started creating a Drupal module. I initially tried out Shadowbox with Drupal 5.7 and the jquery_update module. Unfortunately, some of the critical features of Shadowbox didn’t work with those earlier versions of jQuery so the module is Drupal 6 only.

The Drupal Shadowbox module is currently in development status but don’t let that put you off. Most of the Shadowbox options have been implemented globally but you can still override these options inline by using a JSON-formatted parameter.

Suffice to say we’re really happy with Shadowbox and feel it will make an excellent alternative to the Thickbox and Lightbox2 Drupal modules. At the moment you have to manually add the required attribute. Watch this space for integration with imagefield, imagecache and image modules.