Using lightboxes without Aweber

This is a guest post from Graham Tappenden, who fills me with awe at his technical prowess!

It all started with Mike's article on using lightboxes to increase subscribers.  Many of the comments confirmed my own opinion, that lightboxes are considered by many to be a nuisance, but that they can also be very effective, especially if used sensibly and non over-intrusively.

But the lightbox that Mike uses has one important restriction - it is an AWeber (Aff) feature.

I know that many bloggers use AWeber and many others aspire to do so.  One of the main pieces of advice that new bloggers receive is to build their mailing lists, and more often than not it is AWeber that is the system that is recommended.

Now, I'm not going to knock AWeber because I think it does offer a good service.  But there are two sentences in their knowledgebase that stop me personally from using them for my mailing lists:

"AWeber is only offered in English at this time, and messages are sent using the English character set. While it may be possible to send messages written in other languages with your AWeber account, we do not support or guarantee that in any way."

Whilst I do blog in English on some sites, my main business is in German.  So not only do I need German confirmation e-mails, but I also need to be able to send my content using a German character set.

To cut this part of the story short, I use a different system that offers me roughly the same sort of features as AWeber, but with both languages available.

So I needed to find a lightbox system that would allow me to insert my own code.  I had the following requirements:

- I must be able to change the HTML form code as needed
- I must be allowed to adapt the code if necessary and use it on a commercial website
- the lightbox must disappear if someone clicks in the shadowed area or presses the escape key
- it must set a cookie to make sure that each visitor sees it only once
- it must work with WordPress

After reviewing several systems, I settled on something called "Lightbox gone Wild" by Chris Campbell.  In fact, most of the systems that I looked at were not going to fulfill all of my requirements and this was probably the lesser evil.  It did, importantly, fulfil the first two so I decided to start work on the rest myself.

Luckily, I found some programmers who had already cracked some of the problems:
- Aleksey Korzun had published a mod to make the lightbox automatically appear
- a user in the comments called "preaxz" had a mod to close the lightbox if someone clicks on the shadowed area or presses the escape key

Finally, I added code to my WordPress theme to set and read a cookie to make sure that the lightbox only appears once and added the necessary code to load the library and the style sheet.
To see the final result in action - and in German - take a look at my IT blog.

This lightbox solutions is, of course, interesting for any blogger who does not use AWeber.  I won't bore you all with the code snippets here.  If you want to add it to you own site, follow this link to see my WordPress code.

Please let me know if you find it useful.

Graham Tappenden is a self-employed IT consultant and British ex-pat living in Germany.  He blogs about his life in Germany at AllThingsGerman.net and about IT topics in German atComputius.