I decided to spend the weekend making an easy to use web part for SharePoint that allows anyone to add the LyteBox Javascript photo gallery to either MOSS 2007 or WSS V3. If you haven’t seen LyteBox before you should check it out, it’s used on many websites these days to create a nice Web 2.0 style photo gallery. In a basic Lytebox implementation you have to manually call out each image in HTML, but with LyteBox for SharePoint the images are pulled in automatically from a SharePoint picture library. I have packaged the whole thing up in such a way that you can use the web part even in many hosted environments because it involves no custom code (no DLL’s or web.config changes need).
In my implementation there are two list templates, one that creates a document library with all of the LyteBox Javascript code and another that creates a picture gallery with some sample photos. Also, there is one Content Editor Web Part that gets placed on your page for loading the LyteBox Javascript, and a Data View Web Part that has been preconfigured with custom XSLT to load all of the photos from the picture library and activates them for LyteBox.
Here are some screenshots of it in action:
The project is currently labeled as 1.0 beta, because I assume there will be some issues.
Download the code from: CodePlex Page for LyteBox for SharePoint
Learn more about the original LyteBox code: http://www.dolem.com/lytebox/
Also, a hat tip to Pam Davis for her post that inspired this project: http://padavis.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/web-20-popup-using-lytebox-with-sharepoint/