Movable Type Plugin: Joomsayer
Joomsayer is a plug-in for Movable Type 4 that enables you to display quotations in a very catchy quote box. Joomsayer has two special features:
Firstly, it displays two quote marks; one in the upper left corner, and one in the lower right corner. This may not sound special, but since neither HTML nor stylesheets allow images to be aligned to the bottom right corner, it is a very challenging task for webmasters to achieve this alignment.
Secondly, it relies almost excusively on stylesheets for display. The default stylesheet leads to a quotation box such as the one shown below:
The default stylesheet allows you to position the quotation box centered as above, or floating to the left or to the right in your entry, letting your text flow down on the other side of the box.
The stylesheets allow you to customize the output with a high degree of freedom. For example, you can get an output such as shown in the following screen-shot merely by changing the style sheet:
Requirements
To have something quoted as a Joomsayer, simply press the indentation button once over the paragraph to quote. (Hovering the mouse over the button should display the help text: "Begin Blockquote.") This will cause the text to be encoded as a "blockquote" in HTML terms. On publishing, the Joomsayer plug-in scans all top-level blockquotes and automatically converts them to Joomsayer quotes without changing your original entry.
To add a source for your quote, make sure that the last text in the quoted section is written between '[' and ']', for example:
Upgrading
Remove the Joomsayer from the plug-ins installation before installing.
No templates have changed, so if you've already inserted the <$MTJoomsayer$> in the heading and installed the template, you may skip these parts of the installation.
You'll note that the Joomsayer button has disappeared from the editor. Instead, you'll just mark the section to quote by indenting it using the "Begin Blockquote" button.
Old Joomsayer from version 0.1 were "hardcoded" into the entries when you inserted them, so they will stay in place.
Known Issues
Please use the comment for bug reports and feature requests.
Joomsayer for Joomla is also available as a Joomla plug-in; hence the name.
Firstly, it displays two quote marks; one in the upper left corner, and one in the lower right corner. This may not sound special, but since neither HTML nor stylesheets allow images to be aligned to the bottom right corner, it is a very challenging task for webmasters to achieve this alignment.
Secondly, it relies almost excusively on stylesheets for display. The default stylesheet leads to a quotation box such as the one shown below:
The default stylesheet allows you to position the quotation box centered as above, or floating to the left or to the right in your entry, letting your text flow down on the other side of the box.The stylesheets allow you to customize the output with a high degree of freedom. For example, you can get an output such as shown in the following screen-shot merely by changing the style sheet:
Requirements- Movable Type 4
- Template Installer
- Download Joomsayer for Movable Type, and extract the archive file.
- Upload the contents of the archive to the "plugins" folder in your Movable Type installation. (There should now be a directory called "Joomsayer" in the plugins directory.)
- Go to Preferences -> Plugins for each of the blogs where you want to enable Joomsayer.
- Go to the Joomsayer plug-in, press "Settings," and click on the "Install Templates" button. This will install the necessary Javascript and stylesheet templates. Please note that you must have the Template Installer installed.
- Go to the templates list, and rebuild the "Joomsayer stylesheet" and "Joomsayer JavaScript" templates.
- Go back to the Joomsayer settings, check the "Enable" box, and click "Save Changes."
- For each template for which you plan to use Joomsayer, add the following line between the <head> and </head> tags (if you are using the MT4 default templates, go to the Template Modules and edit the "Header" template):
<$MTJoomsayer$>
- Edit the templates that display entries (in the MT4 default templates, those would be the "Entry Detail" and the "Entry Summary" template modules), adding the tag modifier show_joomsayer="1" to the <$MTEntryBody$> and <$MTEntryMore$> tags; for example:
<$MTEntryBody show_joomsayer="1"$>
- Add a link to the Joomsayer for Movable Type page on your own blog on all pages where Joomsayer displays quotation boxes. The software is free of charge, but you must add a link.
To have something quoted as a Joomsayer, simply press the indentation button once over the paragraph to quote. (Hovering the mouse over the button should display the help text: "Begin Blockquote.") This will cause the text to be encoded as a "blockquote" in HTML terms. On publishing, the Joomsayer plug-in scans all top-level blockquotes and automatically converts them to Joomsayer quotes without changing your original entry.
To add a source for your quote, make sure that the last text in the quoted section is written between '[' and ']', for example:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit. [Lipsum Generator]To convert the source into a URL link, mark it as a link the way you're used to.
Upgrading
Remove the Joomsayer from the plug-ins installation before installing.
No templates have changed, so if you've already inserted the <$MTJoomsayer$> in the heading and installed the template, you may skip these parts of the installation.
You'll note that the Joomsayer button has disappeared from the editor. Instead, you'll just mark the section to quote by indenting it using the "Begin Blockquote" button.
Old Joomsayer from version 0.1 were "hardcoded" into the entries when you inserted them, so they will stay in place.
Known Issues
- As the Joomsayer converts all top-level "blockquote" sections to Joomsayer quotes, this means that anywhere in your entries where you've used the "blockquote" for simple indentation formattion, you'll have a nice quote instead. You may want to revisit these entries.
- I'm not a style sheet wizard, so the quotation boxes will display slightly differently in different browsers and desktop environments.
Please use the comment for bug reports and feature requests.
Joomsayer for Joomla is also available as a Joomla plug-in; hence the name.
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» Joomla plugin: Joomsayer from What's This?
Joomsayer is a plug-in (formerly known as a "mambot") for Joomla, a popular, free open-source content-management system (CMS).The plug-in lets you show beautiful quotes on your site. Joomsayer's special feature is that the layout relies almost complete... Read More
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A common problem with the Joomsayer plugin is that the quotation marks appear as straight quotes rather than curly quotes. It happens because your Movable Type installation has been configured to replace curly quotation marks with straight quotation marks.
To fix it, re-edit your entry, this time in HTML mode. Find the two quotation marks (look for something like ) and replace the straight quotes with “ for the left quote, and ” for the right quote.
You may want to configure Movable Type to not replace curly quotes as well.
Will you be updating Joomsayer plugin for MT 4.1? Apparently it has broken the plugin.
Thanks for the notice.
I didn't upgrade to MT 4.1 until today, but I'll look into this as soon as I can find the time for it.
The Joomsayer plug-in is now available in version 0.2, and should work with MT 4.1. The new version no longer relies on modifying the entry while editing.
I have custom main index, individual archive and stylesheet templates. Will this still work for me??
I'm not clear on the whole Template Installer plugin, and I'm afraid that my custom templates will be replaced.
Thanks, Joe
Joe: yes, the template that is installed is a separate stylesheet file, which is the only thing that the Template Installer plug-in creates. It will not touch any of your current stylesheet files, unless for some reason you managed to call them something like "joomsayer.css". :)
All you need to do is remember to add the tag in the heading of the pages, and the plug-in will add the Joomsayer stylesheet to your current style sheets.
However, the download site is down at the moment due to an upgrade at my web host that broke my installation, so you may not be able to download and install the Joomsayer plug-in until this problem has been solved.