News August 2020
Alpha Test - xbBooks - catalogue and review books
Announcing a new components designed to maintain a personal catalogue of books you have read. This is intended to replace the previous flat file database I have been using for the last 15 years with something that exists online (so that I can access an edit it from any device) and allows for details of books, people - authors and characters - and multiple reviews for each book so that friends an family can add their own reviews.
Currently in development this has now reached a stage where I can start using it, but is still incomplete in some areas. I hope to release a Beta version to the Joomla Extensions directory in September.
xbBooks will be followed dreckly by xbFilms and then a version for live performances (music, poetry, theatre - xbGigs? xbEvents? xbShows? xbPerfomances?...) and possibly a version for music albums or tracks.
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.
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.
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.
Tip Pop Button Plugin
4th January 2019
The Joomla editor extension plugin TipPop Button provides a quick and easy way of inserting Tooltips and Popovers using Bootstrap. Clicking the button brings up a dialogue that allows you to set the text and various parameters for the tip or pop. If you have text selected in the editor the tip will we wrapped around it, or you can enter the text in the dialogue.
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