If you’ve recently upgraded to WordPress 3.3.x and noticed that your shadowbox-js lightboxes aren’t working, then you’re not alone. We use shadowbox-js on a lot of our sites because it’s easy to set up and provides a nice light box interface for videos, images, web pages, etc.
So, when I upgraded some of our sites to the latest version of WordPress, I was surprised to find that the lightbox feature of our sites wasn’t working anymore.
Last night I stumbled across this “Shadowbox JS is broken in WP 3.3 RC1” WordPress support forum conversation. Which led me to this “Shadowbox JS removed from wordpress.org” conversation, which led me to download the latest version of shadowbox-js off of the developers website.
Here’s the fix
Without going into a lot of long drawn out details, apparently older versions of shadowbox-js don’t get along with WordPress 3.3 (or vice versa) and at the same time shadowbox-js has been removed from the WordPress.org plugin repository because of a licensing snafu.
The good news is you can fix shadowbox-js on WordPress 3.3 sites by upgrading to the latest version of the shadowbox-js plugin. However, because the plugin isn’t in the WordPress repository, if you click the plugin update button inside the WordPress admin panel, you might not be getting the latest version of the shadowbox-js plugin.
So, you have to manually download the latest version of shadowbox-js first and then upload it to your website. After that WordPress 3.3 and shadowbox-js work great together.
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
