Display view nodes in lightbox?

Question

What would be the best way to show the nodes from a view in a lightbox, triggered by a single image? The idea would be that a nice photo is shown on a frontpage. When users click on it, a view is opened in a lightbox/thickbox/colorbox/*box. This then shows all nodes in the view.

I currently manage to do this for only images with colorbox, but that's not sufficient as I would like to show captions etc. I would like to use the full colorbox functionality, rather than just the image. I tried using an iframe, however this meant every node is shown with the full site theme (header, logo, footer etc) which is not what I want to do.

Answer 1

I managed in my project by using a custom page template and and an additional get parameter.

Template.php: (In active theme directory)

function phptemplate_preprocess_page(&$vars){
    if( isset($_GET['ajax']) && $_GET['ajax']=='true' ){
        $vars['template_files'][] = 'page-overajax'; # For Drupal 6
        $vars['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'page-overajax'; # For Drupal 7
    }
}

I then created a template file (page-overajax.tpl.php) in theme directory with following content:

<div id="overlay-content-wrapper">
   <?php print $content; ?>
</div>

After this (Clear all caches) you can use any path (page, view, node) with ?ajax=true to pass to your *box to load if it supports for AJAX content.

As using with fancybox:

$("a.overajax").fancybox({
    'width': 400,
    'height': 400,
    ajax: {
        type     : "GET",
        cache    : false,
        url      : "user/user-posts?ajax=true",
        success: function(data) {
              $.fancybox(data);
        }
    }
});

Answer 2

You can use Colorbox Node module:

Gives the user the ability to display ANY page inside a colorbox modal without the header and footer.

Your link should look like this: href="blogs/my-example?width=600&height=600"

Answer 3

For D7, I had to follow stricter naming conventions than in Shuaib Nawaz's answer. My code looks like this:

function my_theme_preprocess_page(&$variables, $hook){
    if( isset($_GET['ajax']) && $_GET['ajax']=='true' ){
        $variables['theme_hook_suggestions'][] = 'page__ajax'; 
        // then use page--ajax.tpl.php for page template file.
    }
}

Perhaps OP can add this to the comments on accepted answer, my score is too low.

Answer 4

Have you tried the Colorbox node module ? I think that's exactly what you need ;)