Rokbox Tutorial - How to Create Joomla Pop-ups

This tutorial was requested by a Joomla training student in our forum. They wanted to make images and videos on their site more interesting by showing them in a pop-up.

Our advice was to try Rokbox from Rockettheme. This extension can place images, videos, audio files, flash files or even entire websites inside a pop-up. This plugin is also available for WordPress.

We're going to show you several ways to use Rokbox on your site:

Installing Rokbox

1. Rokbox can be downloaded from the downloads section of Rockettheme.com.
2. Download both the "Content" and the "System" plugins. If you're using Joomla 1.5, download the top two files. They will be named:
   
   • Rokbox Content Plugin
   • Rokbox System Plugin
3. In your Joomla site, go to Administrator >> Extensions >> Install / Uninstall and upload both.
4. Go to Administrator >> Extensions >> Plugin Manager and enable both.

Testing Rokbox

The normal way of using Rokbox will only work inside articles. Try using this simple example as a test:

{rokbox}images/save.png{/rokbox}

That should place Joomla's save button inside a pop-up for you and also generate a thumbnail for you to click on.

If that doesn't work, you may have a problem with generating thumbnails automatically. You can then try one of these two options:

• Use a text link: {rokbox title=|click here|}images/save.png{/rokbox}
• Use your own image: {rokbox thumb=images/save.png}images/save.png{/rokbox}

Using Rokbox in Articles

There are lots of examples on the Rockettheme demo site: Rocketwerx.com. These are very simple examples to get you started:

• Remote images: {rokbox}http://www.ostraining.com/logo.png{/rokbox}
• Audio files: {rokbox}images/audio/example.mp3{/rokbox}
• Flash files: {rokbox}images/flash/example.swf{/rokbox}
• Youtube videos: {rokbox}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BY40QvWQKE{/rokbox}
• Another website: {rokbox}http://www.google.com{/rokbox}

Using Rokbox Outside of Articles

You can use Rokbox in your other extensions. The only thing you need to do is modify your links so that they contain rel="rokbox".

For example < a href="http://google.com" > becomes < a href="http://google.com" rel="rokbox" >  (I've added a space after each < and before each > so you can see the code)

We've used this technique inside many different extensions.

Configuring Rokbox

There are three places where you can configure options for Rokbox:

1) Inside Extensions >> Plugin Manager >> Content - RokBox

Here you can change the settings for the thumbnails that Rokbox generates automatically:

2) Inside Extensions >> Plugin Manager >> System - RokBox

Here you can select from several different themes for Rokbox. The default is "Light" which provides a white background, but there are others:

If you enable "Legacy Parameters", you'll also get a much wider range of options. Full documentation on those is available on the Rocketwerx site.

3) For Individual Pop-Ups

We saw some examples earlier. Here are some ways you can modify individual pop-ups:

• Set files sizes: {rokbox size=|400 100|} ... this will show an image, flash or video file as 400px wide and 100 high.
• Set website sizes: {rokbox size=|65% 80%|} ... this will show a website as 65% of it's normal width and 80% of it's height.
• Custom thumbnail: {rokbox thumb=|images/example.jpg|} ... so you don't have to use the one automatically generated by Rokbox.
• Custom title: {rokbox title=|This is a cool image|} ... this is what people will click on to see the pop-up, or if there's a thumbnail, this is what they will see if they hover their mouse over the thumbnail.