This is a guest post from Tom Maiaroto of ExpandTheRoom. In this post he explains how to set the "Read More" on your Joomla frontpage to appear after a certain number of characters. This is useful to keep a standard appearance for your articles when you have a large number of people submitting content.
This post grew out of comment that Tom made on our original discussion about the "read more" on Joomla's frontpage.
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How to Change the Joomla Code to Control "Read More"
1. The first file to change is components / com_content / content.php.
This is what my content.php looks like: (search for this under frontpage() method)
// query records
$query = "SELECT a.id, a.title, a.title_alias, a.introtext, a.sectionid, a.state, a.catid, a.created, a.created_by, a.created_by_alias, a.modified, a.modified_by,"
and simply add the other column in the database for attribs.
$query = "SELECT a.attribs, a.id, a.title, a.title_alias, a.introtext, a.sectionid, a.state, a.catid, a.created, a.created_by, a.created_by_alias, a.modified, a.modified_by,"
Also, if you want truncated words to appear on blog sections you'll need to add the same "a.attribs" to the selects there as well.
For example, showBlogSection() method has this line:
// Main data query
$query = "SELECT a.id, a.title, a.title_alias, a.introtext, a.sectionid, a.state, a.catid, a.created, a.created_by, a.created_by_alias, a.modified, a.modified_by ,"
Simply add in "a.attribs" again to that select query like for the frontpage() method.
2. Now put into your show() method:
$article_params = new mosParameters( $row->attribs );
This is a brand new line that lets us use the article's params since the $params here are menu item params:
$introtext_word_cap = $article_params->get( 'introtext_count' );
introtext_count is what I called this param, and in the final step of this tutorial we'll create it in the /administrator/components/com_content/content.xml file
3. Now you'll add in the logic to truncate where it goes into displaying the introtext.
if ( $params->get( 'introtext' ) ) {
//$row->text = $row->introtext. ( $params->get( 'intro_only' ) ? '' : chr(13) . chr(13) . $row->fulltext); // <--- Here's the original line.
// NEW - truncate stuff
// $params->_params->menu_image will only exist on an index page...this is the part I'm not 100% happy with, it's hacky but does its job of determining if we're on an index/blog/front page or on an article view page
if(isset($introtext_word_cap) && $params->_params->menu_image) {
$words = $introtext_word_cap;
$wordCount = count(explode(" ",$row->introtext));
if ($wordCount<$words) {
$adjustedText = $row->introtext;
} else {
$adjustedText = implode(" ", array_slice(explode(" ",$row->introtext), 0, $words)) . '...';
}
} else {
$adjustedText = $row->introtext;
}
// end truncate stuff
$row->text = $adjustedText . ( $params->get( 'intro_only' ) ? '' : chr(13) . chr(13) . $row->fulltext);
} else {
$row->text = $row->fulltext;
}
4. Edit the administrator / components / com_content / content.xml file.
An finally, here's that extra parameter in the content.xml file (note a default of 50 can change to whatever):
<param name="introtext_count" type="text" size="20" default="50" label="Intro Text Word Count" description="How many words to display of the intro text." />
About Tom Maiaroto
My name is Tom Maiaroto and I'm a web developer/designer for ExpandTheRoom located in NYC. My personal blog is at www.concepthue.com/blog. I've been working with Joomla! for a few years now as well as other CMS'. I also create my own CMS systems from scratch.
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