jQuery Popup Dialog And Gallery Plugin Reviews

Popups or 'inline dialogues' are becoming more and more crucial to web design, as they provide an unobtrusive manor to present content without spawning new browser windows which in many cases may not be an option due to popup blockers.

We have all seen, and are mostly sick of the usual Lightbox/Thickbox, but have you seen these! We have rounded some fantastic jquery popup plugins and some not so great ones, read the ratings and reviews to figure out what will work best for your website or application. Some were so bad they didnt even make this list!

FancyBox

The FancyBox plugin is very simple and easy to implement, looks fantastic out of the box, and has very clean CSS for you to expand upon or modify to your liking. Unfortunately it lacks some features that others may have such as modal support but it is work checking out.

• Appearance: 5/5
• Easy Of Use: 5/5
• Features: 3/5
• Captions: Yes
• Gallery Rel Attribute: Yes
• Inline Content: Yes
• Iframe Content: Yes
• Modal Support: No
• Customization: Low
• Download: FancyBox

FaceBox

Although this popup script looks pretty slick I found that it loads fairly clunky, and seriously lacks in polish/features. I had to adjust paths right off the bat to get images to display properly, and it does not have basic support such as the rel attribute for galleries, title attribute for captions etc.

That being said if you love the Facebook popup look check it out!

• Appearance: 4/5
• Easy Of Use: 4/5
• Features: 2/5
• Captions: No
• Gallery Rel Attribute: No
• Inline Content: Yes
• Iframe Content: No
• Modal Support: No
• Customization: Low
• Download: FaceBox

Impromptu

Not that Impromptu looks bad, I would hardly call it generic enough to be suitable for every site out of the box. For those of you looking for image support this is probably not the popup plugin for you, as it primarily was created for dialog support replacing alert(), prompt() etc. I did however get it working with images pretty quick, but either way this is more of an dialog popup script.

• Appearance: 3/5
• Easy Of Use: 3/5
• Features: 4/5
• Captions: No
• Gallery Rel Attribute: No
• Inline Content: No
• Iframe Content: No
• Modal Support: Yes
• Customization: Medium
• Download: Impromptu

BlockUI

This again is more of a developers dialog solution, and a pretty good one at that. Along with providing highly customizable JavaScript modal dialog support, it also can block page elements, or the entire page until Ajax (or other processing) is complete, which is very handy for applications.

BlockUI is ugly out of the box however the site has some good clean examples and how to implement them. It is a little strange in the fact that CSS is applied via JavaScript configuration rather than a stylesheet.

• Appearance: 1/5
• Easy Of Use: 3/5
• Features: 5/5
• Captions: No
• Gallery Rel Attribute: No
• Inline Content: Yes
• Iframe Content: Yes
• Modal Support: Yes
• Customization: High
• Download: BlockUI

nyroModal

This popup dialog plugin has tons of features and an overall sexy look and smooth animation. My main problem with this one is that the consistency was no really there it did nto feel as solid as some of the others and I was getting strange CSS break-age with some images/pages.

• Appearance: 4/5
• Easy Of Use: 4/5
• Features: 5/5
• Captions: Yes
• Gallery Rel Attribute: Yes
• Inline Content: Yes
• Iframe Content: Yes
• Modal Support: Yes
• Customization: High
• Download: nyroModal

FancyZoom

Another Fancy-something?? I guess so! they are very similar too, taking the Apple approach. I find this one to be fine, but the animations lag a little which I think really decreases user experience. Packing nearly the same features as FancyBox (less) I would suggest checking it out before this one.

• Appearance: 3/5
• Easy Of Use: 4/5
• Features: 1/5
• Captions: Yes
• Gallery Rel Attribute: Yes
• Inline Content: No
• Iframe Content: No
• Modal Support: No
• Customization: Low
• Download: FancyZoom

Boxy

Boxy is probably my favorite modal dialog jquery plugin so far, its not bad looking out of the box, very simple to implement, and has quite a few strong/simplistic features which are very polished. If you are in need of this sort of functionality for an application check it out!

• Appearance: 4/5
• Easy Of Use: 5/5
• Features: 4/5
• Captions: No
• Gallery Rel Attribute: No
• Inline Content: Yes
• Iframe Content: Yes
• Modal Support: Yes
• Customization: High
• Download: Boxy

Flyout

The most interesting thing about Flyout is its support for easing functions, making the animations much more amusing, as well as some interesting loading effects. Other than the effects this plugin seriously lacks in standard functionality and because of that I would certainly not recommend it.

• Appearance: 2/5
• Easy Of Use: 4/5
• Features: 1/5
• Captions: No
• Gallery Rel Attribute: No
• Inline Content: No
• Iframe Content: No
• Modal Support: No
• Customization: Low
• Download: Flyout