Front End Solutions
Jquery based solutions
PrettyPhoto by no-margin-for-errors.com
“prettyPhoto is a jQuery lightbox clone. Not only does it support images, it also support for videos, flash, YouTube, iframes and ajax. It’s a full blown media lightbox.”
Whats really great about this piece, is that it supports multiple media types, including the disjointed “yo.utube url’s” that other modal windows seem to have issues with.
Bootstrap by Twitter
Is a slick well thought out and executed project which many, many people are implementing in projects for their UI and UX solutions, ranging from start-up companies, to big players like Disney.
Combining this project with Jquery UI and one will have endless possibilities when working with your web development projects.
Lightbox2 by www.lokeshdhakar.com
A very basic solution limited to photos and galleries but simple and works.
EasyRotator by DWUser.com
This tool works well for rolling out featured image sliders with text content over-layed, it will also give you some decent options for layout choices. Its free and has more options if you want to upgrade. What I really think makes this tool powerful is that it will optimized images for you.
Mootools solutions (no longer supported)
Bumpbox by Artviper
The strong points of this library and what make it a winner, are the broad scope of media types one can implement and use with this one, it does not discriminate. From PDF’s, videos, images, and html it’s all good in bumpbox. Easy to implement and looks good. The down side is that if you want to run it with Jquery who will have to tweak code so it plays nice with Jquery because they both use the same hooks when calling their libraries. The solution is not so bad and can be found here using the Jquery no-conflict (); funciton. Some people may slap wrists for those who use multiple libraries on a page.