Joomla: September 2007 Archives

Joomla Plugin: Joomsayer

By Ole Wolf on September 7, 2007 2:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (28) | TrackBacks (1)
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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 completely on style sheets, and that the quotation marks are shown in the upper left corner and the lower right corner, regardless of text size, a task that poses serious challenge to most webmasters.

A built-in style sheet allows centered, left-aligned, or right-aligned positioning of each quote, and offers customization of colors and text style. (The image to the right is an actual screenshot of Joomsayer in action using a customized style sheet.)

Note that although Joomsayer includes a built-in stylesheet enabling you to start quickly, familiarity with style sheets is required in order to take full advantage of the plug-in.

Get the plug-in here: plugin_joomsayer-0.6b.zip. Note: please do not host this plug-in on your own site, but feel free to link to this blog entry.

This is the official home of the Joomsayer plug-in. Please use the comments for support and suggestions.

Installation Instructions

Install the plug-in via Joomla's mambot installer by browsing to the Joomsayer zip file that you downloaded, and press the "Upload and install" button.
Go to the site mambots menu, and publish the plug-in.
Configure the plug-in's use of style sheets according to your needs; hover the mouse over the configuration parameters for explanations.

Usage

Create your quote by inserting a Joomsayer tag in your content as follows:

{joomsay [suffix=class_suffix] [link=url] [Source]}The text that is to be quoted{/joomsay}

This will render "Text that is to be quoted" in a quote box in your content. The box will include the left quote and right quote characters that you enter in the Parameters list on the right.

If the optional Source (plain text) is specified, this will be shown as the source of the quote. If the optional link=url (with an URL to a web page) is specified, the Source is shown as a link to that page.

The optional suffix=class_suffix is used to assign individual styles to the quotes. The default value for class_suffix is "_wrapper", leading to the full style sheet class name 'joomsayer_wrapper' for the outer <div> tag of the quote. Use the style sheets to customize the Joomsayer appearence for your own choice of class suffixes. (Hint: for the built-in style sheet, you may omit the suffix, or set it to suffix=_left or suffix=_right.)

Hint: to create your own style sheet, first specify "built-in" in the style sheet selection in the Parameters list. Then view the source code of the your web page as it appears on the site. The built-in style sheet will be inserted in the <head> section of the web page.

Remember to publish the Joomsayer plug-in.

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