Forum Discussion

PaulaWoodward's avatar
PaulaWoodward
Community Member
5 months ago

Close button not appearing in a new Lightbox slide

Hi All

I'm new to Storyline 365 and am working on a project that has already been set up.

The issue I'm having is when I set a new slide as a Lightbox slide the close button doesn't appear.

I've looked at all the other Lightbox slides in the project and none of them have anything different in the settings to what I have on my new slide.

When I preview the document and click on the trigger link the Lightbox slide opens as a Lightbox but there's no close button>

Any idea what could be wrong or how to fix this please?

  • An "X" button in the upper right of the screen is the only default close button for a lightbox.

    • If you're not seeing that X when you lightbox a slide, look for a trigger that runs JavaScript on the lightboxed slide. That JS might be hiding the X. 

    If the other lightboxed slides have a "Close" button on the slide itself, that was added by the previous developer. You could copy and paste it to the new slide that you want to lightbox. 

  • Hello!

    Thanks for your rapid response Judy. I've now seen that it does indeed have the "X" button when the LB slide is accessed from the corresponding trigger. But now what I'm seeing is when I hit the Next button on the slide where that trigger is it also goes to that LB slide and then there is no Close button, so you can then not move on to the next slide.

    I'm not sure if it's anything to do with how the slides are set up in the Story view but I notice the ones that do work are off to the side of the slide with a connecting grey arrow see screen shot 1, whereas the problematic one just sits under the slide with the trigger, screen shot 2. 

    Is that where the problem is? And how might I fix it please?

  • The X button only appears when a slide is lightboxed. That's because the program needs a way to close the lightbox so the user can continue the course. 

    • FYI: The default setting for lightboxes is that the NEXT and PREV buttons don't show in the lightbox. There is an option to show the Player buttons in a lightbox. When that's done, the NEXT and PREV buttons are typically given custom triggers to prevent the user from advancing to slides in the lightbox that you don't want them to. 

    The default trigger for the NEXT button is to jump to the next slide.

    • "Jumping" to a slide shows it in the standard mode, that is, the slide within the Player. 
    • Which slide is "next" is based on the slide numbers within a scene.
      • Note: A "jump to next slide" trigger won't go anywhere from the last slide in a scene. In those cases, the trigger needs to jump to a specific slide or it needs to be a "jump to scene" trigger. 

    Thus, if the slide you lightbox is within a sequence of slides using the default "jump to next slide" trigger, then that slide will appear as a regular slide when you click NEXT from the slide before it in the sequence.

    One way to prevent that is to edit the NEXT button trigger on the previous slide in the sequence so it jumps to the specific slide you want it to. 

    When I have slides that will be lightboxed, I typically put them in a separate scene. And the only triggers that access those slides are "Lightbox slide __" triggers. Doing that lets you keep the default "jump to next slide" triggers in the main scene.

    • With this method, you have to include the lightboxed slide when you Preview the course. The program can't jump to or lightbox a slide if it isn't included in the slides being previewed. 

    For information about basic functionality in Storyline, I recommend bookmarking the User Guide: https://community.articulate.com/series/articulate-storyline-360