In the course of working on a freelance project, I took the time to build this as an example for how I was going to add modal functionality to the client's site.
It only takes a small amount of code to activate a modal
<a class="btn" href="#modal-window">Activate Modal Window</a> <script> $(function(){ $('.btn[href=#modal-window]').modalPanel(); }) </script>
This is the text of the modal
Again very little code is required:
$(selector).on('click',function(){ $(this).parents('#modal-window, .modal-window').trigger('do-close'); });