Implementing an image gallery using facebox and will_paginate

On VisitaCSA we’re using defunkt’s facebox to show places images at large. Facebox is a great general-purpose lightbox, because it is fast, stable, is based on jQuery and has got a really clean API.

But we needed more than a simple display lightbox, because we wanted our users to navigate easily between all images, possibly without modifying facebox at all. The solution turned out to be pretty simple, thanks also to the will_paginate plugin we were already using. It all burns out to have:

• A Photo model, instrumented with the has_attachment method
• Resource routes for photos (map.resources :photos, :only => :show in config/routes.rb)
• A show controller method in the PhotosController that calls .paginate with a :per_page argument of 1
• An HTML view for the photo resource, that has pagination controls using the will_paginate helper
• Some jQuery code hooks onto the pagination links and make the browser load via AJAX the next photo directly into the facebox.

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