Automatic Read More in Joomla

Mango — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 15:40:22 +0000

We've always wanted to be able to set up Joomla to automatically add a "Read More" link for articles in Category Blog or Section Blog Layouts so that the articles would all be the same length and they would line up just as pretty as you please. Google revealed a handful of other people attempting the same thing, but having no solution. So Mango wrote a plugin for it.

By popular request, we have added the following new features in the new Version 1.1 Beta 3:

Thumbnails are linked to the full version of the article.
Portuguese and Spanish language files are included. Thanks to the volunteers who translated these!
FJ Related Articles is tentatively supported.
"Developer mode" feature to assist PHP coders in making Auto Read More compatible with other modules.
Bug where special characters were not displayed correctly has been fixed.
Bug where multiple thumbnails were sometimes not displayed correctly has been fixed.

Features:

Automatically adds "Read more..." link after a configurable number of characters.
Articles with shorter intro text display their intro text only.
Works on the Front Page, Category Blog, or Section Blog.
Will not break HTML or break the article in the middle of a word.
Configurable to ignore specific categories, sections, articles, or the Front Page.
Commented so that you may read through the code and add your own features if you like.

Latest version (1.1 Beta 3): Download Plugin to insert Read More links automatically in Joomla articles

Note: If you already use a different version of Auto Read More, you must uninstall it first.

Old versions: 1.0, 1.1 Beta, 1.1 Beta 2

Feature requests, bug reports, and general comments welcome!

Replacing smart quotes, em-dashes, and ellipses with MySQL or PHP

Mango — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:28:24 +0000

Alternate title: "Help! My Quotes Appear as Question Marks or Other Strange Characters!"

The "Smart quotes" feature in Microsoft Office transforms straight quotes into curly quotes. It also transforms hyphens into em-dashes and three periods into ellipses. While one might think, "How lovely! My document looks almost as if I'm educated!" readers of said document may not. Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, decided to assign special characters such as the ones I just mentioned to a range of codes above 128. Problem: these codes were already assigned to other characters, resulting in frustrating incompatibility with non-Microsoft systems.

Keep reading for some PHP and MySQL code to help out with this issue, as well as a Joomla! plugin.

Our introduction to this was in a situation where we had people using many different systems submitting articles to one of our programs. We decided that we wanted all our articles to use straight quotes, hyphens, and periods. This was partly for consistency, and partly because these characters are common to many character sets and won't cause incompatibilities.

This article isn't really intended as a complete explanation of charsets, though we recommend The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets if you're interested in learning more. We will however show you some MySQL and PHP techniques for replacing all instances of smart quotes, plus the en dash, em dash, and ellipsis with straight quotes, one or two dashes, or three dots. This code should operate with both the Windows-1252 charset, and also UTF-8, an encoding with an extended character set that has made it the preferred encoding for email and websites.

MySQL:

# First, replace UTF-8 characters.
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, 0xE28098, "'");
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, 0xE28099, "'");
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, 0xE2809C, '"');
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, 0xE2809D, '"');
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, 0xE28093, '-');
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, 0xE28094, '--');
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, 0xE280A6, '...');
# Next, replace their Windows-1252 equivalents.
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, char(145), "'");
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, char(146), "'");
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, char(147), '"');
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, char(148), '"');
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, char(150), '-');
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, char(151), '--');
UPDATE `t` SET `c` = REPLACE(`c`, char(133), '...');

PHP:

// First, replace UTF-8 characters.
$text = str_replace(
 array("\xe2\x80\x98", "\xe2\x80\x99", "\xe2\x80\x9c", "\xe2\x80\x9d", "\xe2\x80\x93", "\xe2\x80\x94", "\xe2\x80\xa6"),
 array("'", "'", '"', '"', '-', '--', '...'),
 $text);
// Next, replace their Windows-1252 equivalents.
 $text = str_replace(
 array(chr(145), chr(146), chr(147), chr(148), chr(150), chr(151), chr(133)),
 array("'", "'", '"', '"', '-', '--', '...'),
 $text);

Joomla!:
Joomla! plugin for removing smart/curly quotes, em-dashes and ellipses.

Additionally, here's a table of character codes that you may find useful:

Character	HTML Code	Windows	UTF-8	name
‘	‘	145	E28098	left single curly quote
’	’	146	E28099	right single curly quote
“	“	147	E2809C	left double curly quote
”	”	148	E2809D	right double curly quote
–	–	150	E28093	en dash
—	—	151	E28094	em dash
…	…	133	E280A6	ellipsis

Further reading from Wikipedia:
UTF-8

ISO/IEC 8859-1

Windows-1252

The Fruits of my Labour » Joomla

Automatic Read More in Joomla

Replacing smart quotes, em-dashes, and ellipses with MySQL or PHP