Hi,
one my other website energies2demain.com I use a bunch of plugins to improve the behavior of WordPress.
One of them is WP-Slimbox2 which allow to display a nice lightbox when the visitor click on a picture.
This plugin is great but it decrease the performance of the website, but we can correct that.
First, what cause the problems : too many files need to be load :
- One css file : plugins/wp-slimbox2/slimbox2.css
- one Javascript file : plugins/wp-slimbox2/javascript/slimbox2.js
- an other Javacript file : plugins/wp-slimbox2/javascript/slimbox2_autoload.js
- 3 images to make the button to close, next and previous
To simply decrease the number of file to download, I simply put them in the template of my theme : I took the output of the javacript from firebug and put them in the bottom of footer.php . Same thing with the css in the main css file from the theme. For the picture, well, I didn’t figure yet :p .
One big big problem with this solution : after the update of the plugin, every thing is lost. Moreover, the “mess” you put in all the files are still here.
So I’m going to write a very light plugin to do a lightbox in jQuery. This plugin will have no option, no configuration and no image to control, no installation. Basically, is going to be only a Javascript snippet that you will have to insert in the footer of your theme.