xbBooks - Catalogue of books
25th October 2020
xbBooks is a component for cataloguing books you have read and reviews of them. This is the first public alpha release, it should really not be used on production sites (although I am ;-) ). There are definitely bugs and missing functions - although I've not found anything fatal yet.
It started out as I needed something to replace a flat-file database I had been using to save details of books I read and short reviews/comments. Previous to that I had been using a simple spreadsheet and originally an paper file.
Edit Hide/Highlight Package
23rd July 2019
xbEdHideLight is a spin-off from xbFootnoteTag which provides the facility to highlight or hide text in the editor (TinyMCE or JCE) WYSIWYG view whilst having no effect on the front end article display.
I find Highlighting is useful for marking sections of text that need revision or updating later, and I use Hiding to conceal long shortcodes that clutter up the edit view once they are working.
Truncate String Plugin
23rd June 2019
Joomla JHtml::string.truncate() function has a couple of minor but annoying bugs. See previous article TruncString Bugs and blog post for details. The new System Plugin xbTruncString provides an override for only this function rather than having to override the entire string.php library code (eg by using the mvcoverride plugin) and then maintain it when any part is updated in the core.
Function declaration:
public static function truncate($text, $length = 0, $noSplit = true, $allowHtml = true)Footnote Tag Package
15th July 2019
xbFootnoteTag was originally created to assist with creating and maintaining references, or other recurring snippets of information in articles. As well as generating conventional footnotes (linked by either a number or a citation title) since we are in a hypertext environment it makes sense to provide an option to have the reference appear as a popover either instead of or as well as a footnote (footnotes work better if the article gets printed).
Article Manager
31st January 2019
xbArtMan is a component to provide some additional tools for backend administration of Joomla content. Initially it focuses on three areas that I have had difficulty with - seeing what tags are assigned to which articles, seeing what links are embedded in articles and defined as related item links (and checking that they are valid), and seeing what images are used in which articles.
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