My new favorite jQuery pop-up plugin is facebox. It gives a Facebook style pop-up box and it’s REALLY easy to use.
Basically, just include the CSS and JS files in your web page and one or two lines of jQuery code at load, then any anchor tag can create a pop-up box.
The jQuery code:
jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
$('a[rel*=facebox]').facebox()
})
Then I can use the anchor tag like this:
<a href="#div_id" rel="facebox">click here</a>
It can’t get much easier than that!
You can find out more about the plugin here.