News April 18th 2026
New version of xbMusic now has a site view for index of songs
xbMusic v0.0.62.1-alpha J5
NOT FOR PRODUCTIONN USE now available
xbMusic, a manager for music files with details of songs, albums, artists, and playlists as well as individual track files.
xbBooks - book catalogue
xbBooks is an xbCulture family component for cataloguing books you have read and reviews of them. Version 1.1.1.2 is the current release.
It started out as I needed something to replace a local 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.
xbBooks is installed as a package containing two components - com_xbboos and a supporting component, com_xbpeople, for administration of people and characters which are common to all xbCulture components.
The primary intended user is someone wanting to keep a record of books they have read with a reminder of the plot and what their reaction was.
11th March August J3
Truncate String Plugin
23rd June 2019 J3
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)Tip Pop Button Plugin
4th January 2019 J3
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.