Website rebuild, continued: Next problem, fancy box

[JoyceOdell]

Okay, this is a problem that I am pretty sure I know the answer to. So this post is mainly to get confirmation as to whether i've interpreted the info correctly.

Back when I was doing my previous rebuild, I got pointed at a JavaScript plug-in (or add-on, or whatever it calls itself) called fancybox, from a company called FancyApps, or words to that effect. This produces a gallery overlay which works like a carousel to display a series of images which is accessed by clicking on any of the thumbnails of the images inside a <div> on your page. You click on a thumbnail and you get a black overlay running on top of your page, and a display of the full-sized image with a caption, and arrows to scroll through the collection. When you click on the black area outside the image it all goes away.

I added the code to my site and it worked perfectly.

Well, now I'm building a new version of the site, and it doesn't work at all.  It's the same version of fancybox, the same version of Dreamweaver, and the new site uses most of the components of the old one. So it's not likely to be an issue of incompatibility. What particularly flumoxed me was when I opened up a template from the old site deleted it's .css file, and linked it to the .css file of the new one. which borked everything, including the fancybox gallery which was on that template page.

So I checked the company's website. Which is still online for "historical purposes" and followed the link to their new site. There isn't a "Support" link anywhere on the new site and the old one only links to a YouTube video.

However, snce I had my suspicions, I sgned in and checked my account. It's still there and still active. So I went and checked their pricing layout. I had purchased a 'Single" license. As I suspected, it appears that the plug-in of a single license can only be applied to one user, and one site.

So. I am *assuming* that if I remove the fancybox script and .css link from all the pages of the old site, it will start to work in the new one. Right? Has anyone else been in a position of having done this, or are there some extra hoops that I'll have to jump through?

[Ben M]

With licenses it is hard to say and your best bet would be to ask the company you purchased the license from. As an example, some instances would involve entering a serial number somewhere and if the serial was used twice it was seen as 2 installations .

However, I can't say that is your issue based on the description as the script should still load or through an error somewhere. Can you post a link to a sample page where the script is not loading so that we can evaluate what you have going on?

[JoyceOdell]

Much of my problem is due to the fact that there is no easily located contact link on the Fancyapps site to ask anyone anything. I suspect that upgrading my license from 'Single' to 'Extended' will solve my problem. 

I did finally find a very small, inconspicuous line at the bottom of the purchase page with an email link (and to a discord server) so I can at least *try* to get some usable information from the vendors.

The other part of the problem is that I know absolutely *nothing* about JavaScript, so none of the information that actually is on the website makes the least bit of sense to me. The code is working perfectly in my current site. (it's the navigation system which is borked there). But trying to use it in the site wheich will replace it is clearly a no-go. Since I intend to archive the current site, once it's replaced,  that site will still exist, so I gather that the licence doesn't care whether the sites are both online or not. The code will only work in one of them.

Since my rebuild will almost certainly be replaced in turn, once I finally go looking for someone to pay to have it ported into a more "responsive" format, moving to the 'Extended' license is probably the way to go.

Depending on whether I get a response that I can use, I may be back in a day or two. 

At present none of the new rebuild is anywhere except on my hard drive, so it's a bit premature to talk about links.

But thank you for the info. It did add some context to the issue.

[Nancy OShea]

FancyBox has gone through several itterations. Everything you need to know + examples can be found on the FancyApps UI website below:

https://fancyapps.com/fancybox/

[JoyceOdell]

Actually, I'm finding their website supremenly unhelpful. It assumes a great deal of knowledge that a layman will not have.

[Nancy OShea]

Plugin makers assume users have some basic code literacy but nothing advanced. Copying & pasting code doesn't require formal training. See example:

https://jsfiddle.net/xes4j9pg/

If this is outside your wheelhouse, hire someone to help you.  It would be counterproductive to paint yourself into a corner you can't get out of.

[JoyceOdell]

The person at Fancyapps that got my email directed me to that page. It turned out that upgrading to the current version (and incorporating the code from that page) got around the problem. At least for this iteration of the site. I will undoubtedly need to hire somebody to get it moved into a fully "respnsive" format, at some point, and dealing with things like fancybox will probably be a part of that package. But that's a different problem for a different day.

The problem with copy/pasting is that one needs to be able to recognize what you are pasting into things, and without the proper vocabulary, that isn't always doable. But at least this time I got there eventually.

[Nancy OShea]

If you use Bootstrap's responsive 12-grid layout framework, it comes with built-in classes for Modal Windows & Carousel Sliders plus a lot more....   No 3rd party plugin scripts required.

https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.2/components/modal/

https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.2/components/carousel/