I can’t seem to stop creating jQuery plugins. The project that’s currently taking up most of my time provides me a lot of freedom in the way the site is designed. As I work through various parts of the site, my brain begins to come up with ways to enhance parts here and there with jQuery. Several parts of the site will have images interspersed with text. Some of these pages will use a lightbox to allow the visitor to view a larger version of the image while other pages won’t. Some pages will have images that have captions, yet the captions are getting in the way visually of the flow of the page. jQuery to the rescue.
How can I caption these images while maintaining the clean look of the site? Before I tried to develop anything new, I searched around for some creative caption solutions using any JavaScript framework. Low and behold none of them did what I was thinking of so I came up with Drop Captions.
Drop Captions
In a nutshell, drop captions takes an image’s title attribute and converts it into a caption that appears only when the mouse is moved over the image. This allows me to maintain a clean look to the site, while enabling the functionality of captions. It’s also totally degradable if the user has JavaScript disabled; the title attribute will still display the exact same text.
Demo
- Example 1
- Example 2 (demonstrates how drop captions can be used with other JavaScript frameworks)
Download
Download jquery.dropcaptions.js
What’s So Great About This Plugin?
- It’s a mere 3 KB (about half that if you compress it)
- Completely degradable
- Easily configurable
- Styled with CSS
- Reusable on multiple images
How to Use
To get up and running, all you need to do is apply the plugin to any images on your page. To use the plugin you’ll need to have a copy of jQuery, or point to jquery on Google, and the plugin. Place the plugin files on your site and link to them:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.dropcaptions.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
$('.captionedimage').dropCaptions();
});
</script>
You can also include the popular
jQuery easing plugin to add some nice easing effects to the captions.
That’s it! You can apply drop captions to any number of images on a page. Check out the demo code for working examples.
Options
The following options are configurable:
- showSpeed – how long (in milliseconds) it should take to display a caption when mousing over an image. Default: 500
- hideSpeed – how long (in milliseconds) it should take to hide a caption when mousing out from an image. Default: 500,
- showOpacity – The final opacity of the caption once displayed (0-1). Default: .85
- hideOpacity – The final opacity of the caption once displayed (0-1). Default: 0
- showEasing – The style of easing to use when displaying a caption. Default: ‘swing’
- hideEasing – The style of easing to use when hiding a caption. Default: ‘swing’
- showDelay – how long of a delay (in milliseconds) it should take before the animation of showing a caption begins on mouseover. Default: 0
- hideDelay – how long of a delay (in milliseconds) it should take before the animation of hiding a caption begins on mouseout. Default: 0
Options are added when calling the script:
$('.captionedimage').dropCaptions({
showSpeed: 2000,
hideSpeed: 1000,
showOpacity: 1,
hideOpacity: 0,
showEasing: 'easeOutElastic',
hideEasing: 'easeInQuint',
hideDelay: 2000
});
The caption area can by styled via CSS and targeting the caption class. For example:
.caption {
background: #333;
border-right: 1px solid #666;
border-bottom: 1px solid #666;
border-left: 1px solid #666;
border-top: 1px solid #666;
font-family: Verdana;
font-size: 11px;
padding: 4px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomright: 6px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 6px;
-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 6px;
-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 6px;
color: #eee;
}
Enjoy!