Custom Photo Modal

A modal is a popup that slides in on top of the current page. Mobile apps use modals quite a bit, because they look and work great.

Click the image to the left to see an example of a modal.

We use modals in AppPresser for a variety of things, including login screens and BuddyPress activity posting. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a custom modal for an image gallery.

We will create a page that allows app users to upload images, which get displayed in a gallery on the same page. Clicking an image opens a modal with the full screen image.

You will need the AppTheme and AppCamera extensions for this tutorial.

You will need a child theme for this tutorial, you can download the finished project files below. Note: Depending on the theme you are using, you may need to change this line in style.css: @import url(“../apptheme/style.css”); to @import url(“../AppPresser/style.css”);.

AppTheme Child – Modals

You can install the child theme, then all you need to do is add the page markup below. The PHP, javascript and CSS is already taken care of.

The WordPress Page

We need a gallery to show our images. WordPress has this taken care of with a gallery shortcode. Create a new page, and add this shortcode (you’ll need to upload some images to get it to display).

[gallery link="file" columns="4"]

Below that, we’ll add the markup for our modal.

The Modal

The AppTheme already has everything you need for a modal, but we have to add some customizations. First, we will add the markup for the modal. You can see the basic markup in our documentation.

We need to make some customizations to this markup. We need to change the ID of the modal, then get rid of the header since we won’t be using it.


[gallery link="file" columns="4"]

<div id="gallery-modal" class="io-modal"> <div class="modal-content"><img class="gallery-modal-image io-modal-close" src="" /></div> </div>


There is no source for our image tag, because we’ll add that dynamically with javascript.

Child Theme Files

If you installed the child theme, you don’t need to add anything else. The code below is explained for learning purposes, so you can create more custom modals.

Enqueue our script

Create a file named app-custom.js, and place it in the /js folder of your child theme. We need to enqueue this file, so create or open functions.php in your child theme, and add this code.

<?php

function appp_custom_scripts() {
    wp_enqueue_script( 'appp-custom-scripts', get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/js/app-custom.js', array('jquery'), '1.0.8', true );
}

add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'appp_custom_scripts' );

The javascript

Next, open app-custom.js, and add this code.

function apppCustomModal(event) {
    
    $ = jQuery;
    
    event.preventDefault();
    
    $('.gallery-modal-image').attr( 'src',  '' );

    var UpClasses   = 'slide-in-up-add ng-animate slide-in-up slide-in-up-add-active';
    var downClasses = 'slide-in-up-remove slide-in-up-remove-active';

    //get href of button that matches id of modal div
    var ImageURL = $(this).attr('href');

    // need to move .css to css file
    $('#gallery-modal').css('display', 'block').removeClass(downClasses).addClass(UpClasses);
    
    setTimeout(function() { 
        $('.gallery-modal-image').attr( 'src',  ImageURL );
    }, 300 );

}

jQuery(document).on('ready load_ajax_content_done', function($) {
    jQuery('.gallery-icon a').on( 'click', apppCustomModal );
});

This script opens the modal, gets the url of the link that is clicked, and inserts it as the image source.

At the top of this file we are resetting things and defining variables. The up and down classes control the modal animation, we will add and remove those to make the modal open or close.

The image tag in our markup already has the io-modal-close class, which means that when people click on the image, the modal will close.

A couple important things to note: this script fires on the load_ajax_content_done event, which is a custom event in the AppTheme when the page has loaded. It also fires on the ready event, just in case the page is not loaded via ajax.

Also, you’ll see that we did not put our apppCustomModal() function inside the jQuery.on function at the bottom. This is a best practice for extensibility later on.

The CSS

We need to make some tweaks to make this look nice in our app. In your child theme style.css file, add this code.

/* Modal */

#gallery-modal {
    margin-top: 48px;
    padding-top: 0;
}

#gallery-modal .site-header {
    background: transparent;
    box-shadow: none;
}

#content .gallery a img {
    width: 100%;
    max-width: 100%;
}

/* Gallery */

.loggedin-camera-buttons {
    text-align: center;
}

.gallery-item {
    margin-top: 0 !important;
    margin-bottom: 0 !important;
}

Camera button

As a final touch, you can add a camera button at the top of your WordPress page, so that app users can upload their own photos to your gallery.

If you have the AppCamera extension active, simply add the shortcode above your gallery shortcode. Together, it looks like this:

[app-camera]

[gallery link="file" columns="4"]

That’s it! Now you have a nice interactive photo gallery for your app, with user uploads.

Cheers!