Knowledge Base / FAQ/User Guides

SimpleBox User Guide - Quick Start

Kevin
posted this on September 23, 2010 21:43

The key steps covered in this article...

SimpleBox Stack is an innovative new Stacks Add-on for the great Stacks Plugin.

Ever wanted a lightweight, but highly flexible lightbox/overlay to handle Youtube, Vimeo, HTML forms (mailing list subscription forms too) and even Stacks that contain text and images, columns? SimpleBox is all of these and more but best of all , SimpleBox can auto load/pop your content on a page, all without lifting a finger and sweating about complex coding.

Perfect for Portfolios, Advertising and getting your product and brand image across all contained in our CSS3 lightbox, yes with just a dash of jQuery added in to help automate everything.

Features:
Lightweight CSS3 no images apart from the Close Icon and a touch of jQuery , it is tiny only 5kb in size
Degrades nicely to browsers without support for CSS3 rounded corner and box-shadows
YouTube embed support
Vimeo Support , yes even the new iframe embed code from Vimeo for HTML5 too
Blip.tv Support
QuickTime
Images
Add iframe content for instance like GoogleMaps
Highly flexible options to change the width and height of each SimpleBox
Add one time only to Stacks Page less code and bloat.
Tested on iPad and iPhone and looks best on modern browsers*
4 Individual Close-Icon SimpleBox Icon Styles to choose from controlled in the Stack Settings
Auto SimpleBox load , configurable by number of seconds and how long you want the cookie to be set.

Did we say it is super Simple to use too :)
* IE8 supported , IE7 only with manual height and width adujustments

 

Install

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You have downloaded the disk image , this wil normally reside in your downloads folder.
Just double click on the installer to start the stack installer
When the install is complete restart RapidWeaver to ensure the Stack will show up in your Stacks Library

Add Stacks Page

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Let us kick off by Adding a Stacks page , after all SimpleBox is a Stack Add On Plugin/Library Item

Drag SimpleBox on to Stacks Page

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Adding the SimpleBox stack is easy , just drag onto the page

SimpleBox on Stacks Page - Edit Mode

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Well nothing special to look at right now , but a few important items to point out here
1. That’s right you only need to add the SimpleBox once only per Stacks Page, unlike other stacks we want to aoid and repetition
2. The SimpleBox HUD Inspector (more on that below)
3. Where we drop any content whether this is HTML, Text , images
4. the rel tag that we use to create links to the individual SimpleBoxes

Example - Add an Image Stack & Image

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We dropped in one of the default Image Stacks in the Stack Library and added our image, you can scale your image using the Stacks Image Inspector that is really up to you right now :D
This being the first item it has a REL tag of symbox0 just keep that in mind for the next steps

The SimpleBox Stack HUD Settings

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Select the stack boundary and then click the little info icon

SimpleBox Settings

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We did tell you that SimpleBox was easy to use and a lot of the flexibility is utilized when we are using Text Content.

Images, Embedded QuickTime Videos, Vimeo, YouTube anything that has a defined width and height you don't need to wrory about the extra Parameters for SimpleBox (more explained later)
The following settings are Global.
1. Number of SimpleBox Content Stacks
2. The Border color of the SimpleBox when opened
3. The CSS3 box shadow color for SimpleBox
4. Background fade/overlay color
5. Type of Close Icon to choose (1=White, 2=Black , 3=Blue, 4=Red)
6. Background fade/overlay opacity
7. To change the ToolTip and Alt Tag of the SimpleBox Window ( for instance to another language)
8 .To access our Support HelpDesk/FAQ
9. SymfoniP Home Page

Since we are just showing off one SimpleBox example in this quick start guide we will leave al the settings as they are for now.

Add the text Stack so we can make links for SimpleBox

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For simplicity just add the Text Stack to the Top

Text Stack now on Page

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Okay there, we have the text stack now on our Stacks Page , lets get on with editing the text in our example .

Edit Text Stack

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Add some text to indicate to the web visitor what they will open :)

Select Some text which will trigger the SimpleBox

Add Link

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We want to make that link select the add link Icon as shown.        

Edit Link - Part 1

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For SimpleBox in this example to work with an image we do not need to add anything in the URL field but we will need to add the REL attribute under Custom Attributes.
1. Click on that little + icon

Edit Link - Part 2 -Adding the REL attribute for SimpleBox

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1. Here you can see the rel attribute linked to the rel tag/trigger for the SimpleBox Content since it was the first item symbox0 is used
A Title is optional SimpleBox does not use this .
2. All Done then Set Link

Link Completed

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Once the add link is completed you can see that we have blue underline indicating linked text.

Go on Let us Preview

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Page Preview - Caribou Theme

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Looking good! here is the link (1.) , and you will see that the image we added to the SimpleBox is now hidden from page view.

Click on your Link

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Wow that was easy! Here is the SimpleBox open and showing off your image.

 

Comments

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Dale Marcell

Fantastic coding , nice app - Your hard work has paid off. 

September 28, 2010 03:21
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Guy Veillet

What a great new Stack! Very useful. Keep up the good work. 

September 28, 2010 03:24