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The Colorbox module has now replaced Thickbox module for lightbox effects here on xdeb.org. Here follow some background around the projects.

In the Drupal 4.7 days I was looking for a jQuery based Lightbox solution and found the ThickBox plugin. I developed the Thickbox module to integrate it with Drupal. Today it’s used on more than 19000 web sites.

Since a couple of years the Thickbox plugin is no longer maintained and it’s becoming cumbersome to keep it updated with good browser support. Time for a new solution.

There are a great number of Lightbox-style solution today. I was looking for something that was:

• Actively maintained
• Lightweight
• Built for jQuery 1.3 and 1.4
• Good and solid features
• Easy to style

The Colorbox plugin had everything I was looking for so that was my pick. A Colorbox module already existed created by Joe Wheaton (jdwfly). He was very willing to make me a co-maintainer.

I started with porting over all the features from the Thickbox module. Then the project started to get some really neat patches so it now has many more features than Thickbox.

Colorbox has excellent integration with Imagefield, Imagecache, Insert and Image modules. Drush command to download the Colorbox plugin. Drush make file (only 6-dev yet). Easy to integrate with for other modules. And there is more features to come, drop by the issues queue and help out!

There will be no Thickbox module for Drupal 7, the recommended upgrade path is instead Colorbox. A working Drupal 7 development release already exists for Colorbox.

Colorbox is still in beta, mostly because it depends on jQuery Update 2 that only is available as a alpha release as of this writing.

If jQuery Update 2 does not gives you problems then you can start using Colorbox today.

Take a look at the cases section of my friends at SthlmConnection for another Colorbox example use.