Question

I have pages with articles. When someone clicks on them from an outside source how can I make that article pop up in fancybox and have the index page as the parent page.

I have my pages set up in this format: pages.php?id=123

I want to open that link from my index.php with the fancybox already open to that link.

Answer 1

You can check the referrer on pages.php to see if it’s from an outside source, and then redirect to the index page with something in the parameter (e.g. ?external=true;articleid=123) identifying that a Fancybox should pop up with the appropriate article.

For example, on pages.php:

$(function(){
  if (document.referrer.indexOf(<your url>) < 0){
    window.location = "index.php?external=true;article=123";
  }
});

And then on index.php:

$(function(){
  //Insert code here to parse query string. You can find code for this online.
  var isExternal = getValueOfExternal();
  var articleId = getValueOfArticleId();
  if (isExternal){
    //open fancybox
    $.fancybox({
      'href': 'pages.php?id=' + articleId
    });
  }
});