Videobox – Lightbox for Videos
As I stated in my previous post, I am fairly new to this whole web blog / web designing thing. Out of necessity for our company’s business success, I have had to learn how to do some basic web designing and blog creation. While I have been learning, I have also been having a lot of fun trying new plugins and new code on our site and blog. I came across many sites that were using lightbox for pictures. This is not that new or exciting because it seems like almost every blog is using some kind of variant plugin which seems to have spun off the original lightbox. But (excuse me if I am wrong) it didn’t seem like many people were using lightbox to display their videos. In fact, I had a hard time locating the videobox plugin at all. It wasn’t in any of the common wordpress repositories, at least that I could find when I searched. When I finally did locate this great plugin, I found it on a site hosted somewhere in South America and I had to use Google to translate the page so that I could get some basic instructions on how to use the plugin. And I found that after all this, the instructions given were incorrect. Therefore, I had to look into the code of the plugin to figure out what the parameters for using this plugin should be. And since I am not a coder and I know many wordpress bloggers are also not coders, I thought my success and instructions for installing and using this great plugin might be helpful to those out there also attempting to do the same thing with their blog. But first, let me show you what the plugin does and explain the reasons as to why you might want to install the plugin on your blog or site.
Example:
Click here to demo.
As you can see, there are several reasons why this plugin might be useful for displaying videos on your blog or site; but allow me to enumerate just a few:
- It is neat. It seems like embedded video often appears to look sloppy when displayed on most blogs. With “videobox”, the appearance is much neater for a few reasons:
- Size can be adjusted. The size of the video thumbnail can be enlarged or shrunk to the size of your choosing. This is a very beneficial aspect, especially for those blogs that display a large amount of video content.
- Text can be wrapped around the thumbnail. Unlike embedded video, with videobox your text can be wrapped around the thumbnail image but I did not demonstrate that capability in this example. This would help to save even more valuable space.
- You can choose any image thumbnail to most accurately demonstrate what your video will be about. With most embedded video you are not allowed to specify what the thumbnail picture will be.
- It’s just plain cool. Of course, this second point, is just a matter of opinion. But if you agree, let me now briefly explain how to install it.
Here’s how to install the Videobox plugin:
- Download and unzip the plugin. Install the folder contents to your wordpress plugin directory.
- Activate the plugin.
- To use, simply add rel=”videobox” to the anchor tag of your video clip thumbnail. Within the rel=”videobox” tag you can add dimensions to your video’s size if you want. In my video example above, I made the video size to be 600×450. Notice the code example below. I simply edited the tag to be rel=”videobox 600 450″. So here is how my code looked for the above video example:
<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWfIhFhelm8″ rel=”vidbox 600 450″ title=”Ron Paul, a real life American patriot.”><img src=”http://img.youtube.com/vi/IWfIhFhelm8/2.jpg” />Click here to demo.</a>
That’s it. Yes it really is that easy! And trust me, I am very new to blogging (less than 10 post old) and so if I can do it, truly anybody can.
As always, if you found this blog article helpful or useful in any way, please digg or social bookmark it, or both.
-Kyle
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2 Responses to “Videobox – Lightbox for Videos”
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April 10th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Is there any way to use videobox along with lightbox? I want to use videobox for my youtube videos and lightbox 2 for my images.
November 10th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
It works for me.