JavaScript Coder

JavaScript Popup Windows

beginner JavaScript Popup javascript popup window jQuery Popup

JavaScript popups are handy to display help information or to zoom in an Image.

There are different types of Popups. The first type is a new browser window opened using the window.open() function. Such types of Popup windows were overused and exploited by many websites during the earlier days of the web. This resulted in the later versions of browsers blocking popup windows. Eventually, popup windows became almost extinct now. Automatically opening popup windows is considered a very bad practice.

Div based popups

Div is a block of content enclosed with the <div> and </div> tags. Unlike the browser window popups, div based popups are less intrusive and are often very useful.

There are a number of ways to use a popup.

Tooltips

JavScript tooltip

Tooltips are useful pieces of information displayed usually on moving the mouse cursor on top of an element. (like an image or a link). The qTip jQuery plugin is good to show tool tips.

jQuery is a great JavaScript Library. You can learn it here

Here are the steps to create some cool tool tips:

For the elements that you need the tooltip, give a unique id attribute. For this example, we add an id attribute to the hyper link like this:


<a href='#' id='link_example1'>The tooltip Link</a>

Now, add the following code to your page within the <head> and </head> tags:


<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="jquery.qtip-1.0.0-rc3.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function()
{
    $('#link_example1').qtip(
    {
     content:'A simple tooltip for the link',
     style: {name: 'dark', tip: 'topLeft'}
    });
});
</script>

The first line adds jQuery to to your page. If you already have jQuery included in your page, no need to add that line. The second line adds the tooltip library qTip. (You can download the script from here and don’t forget to upload the script to your website )

The line below creates the tooltip:


$('#link_example1').qtip(
    {
     content:'A simple tooltip for the link',
     style: {name: 'dark', tip: 'topLeft'}
    });

As you might have noticed, this attaches the tooltip to the element with the unique ID link_example1

See the jQuery tooltip demo here

The qTip jQuery plugin has a huge set of customizable options. See the documentation.

Colorbox is another good Popup jQuery plugin. The example below shows how to open a modal popup when a link is clicked

First, the link:


<a href='content_help.html' id='link_content' >Help Link</a>

Notice that the link points to ‘content_help.html’ we want to open ‘content_help.html’ in a popup.

Now, the popup code: Put the code below between <head> and </head> tags of your page.


<link media="screen" rel="stylesheet" href="colorbox.css" />
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="jquery.colorbox-min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(function()
    {
        $('#link_content').colorbox({opacity:0.3});
    });
</script>

Notice that the ID of the link is link_content.

The code below opens the popup.


$('#link_content').colorbox({opacity:0.3});

You can provide any valid link (like an image ) in he href attribute of the link. The colorbox plugin grabs it and puts it in the popup.

See the Popup demo here

For more options and customization, see the colorbox documentation page

Opening a popup on loading the page

We can use Colorbox plugin to open a popup on loading the page as well. Here is the code (put it inside <head> and </head> tags of your page ) :


<link media="screen" rel="stylesheet" href="colorbox.css" />
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="jquery.colorbox-min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function()
{
    $(window).bind('load',
        function(e)
        {
            $.colorbox({opacity:0.3, href:"offer.html"});
        });
});
</script>

The code opens the page “offer.html” in the popup:


$.colorbox({opacity:0.3, href:"offer.html"});

See the popup demo here

Delayed popup

A slight change in the code above can delay the popup for a few seconds.


$(function()
{
$(window).bind('load',
    function(e)
    {
    window.setTimeout(function()
        {
         $.colorbox({opacity:0.3, href:"offer.html"});
        }, /*timeout->*/ 2000);
    });
});

Delayed popup demo

You can download the samples here

See Also

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