I was running into a small issue on a project that I’ve been developing with the Textpattern CMS: I couldn’t find a tag to convert a title to a “URL-only title” like the Write tab on the admin side does for you. Textpattern has a built-in function named sanitizeForUrl() which provides this functionality, but no way to get that from the template system.

After looking for a tag that does this, I quickly whipped up a new plug-in: mta_sanitize.

When would you likely use this? Usually to assist in building links.

In my case, I needed to build a link in the form of “http://domain.tld/section/persons-name/” where the person’s name (first & last; properly capitalized) was stored in a custom field. The person’s name would be shown in one article, but needed to link to another article with more details.

I could’ve provided a link to the person’s detail article, but then I would’ve had to find a unique way to look up the article’s title using only the URL, title, or ID. I felt it’d be more flexible to store the name in a human readable format which wouldn’t require additional database lookups to display and so that left converting the name to a URL-friendly format. What better way than to use the same method that Textpattern already uses to convert titles to URL-friendly format?

With mta_sanitize installed, here’s an example of how I would build a link to a person’s detail article:

<a href="<txp:site_url />/section/<txp:mta_sanitize><txp:custom_field name="Person" /></txp:mta_sanitize>/"><txp:custom_field name="Person" /></a>

Which would result in the following HTML (assuming the “Person” custom field were populated with “John Doe”):

<a href="domain.tld/section/john-doe/">John Doe</a>

Hopefully others will find this useful. If you have any questions, comments, or feature requests, please drop me a line.

Another year, another mta_digg_it Textpattern plug-in update. This time, version 0.3:

mta_digg_it-0.3.txt (see full info)

This release brings some minor updates to the documentation, the compact attribute’s functionality has been moved to the more flexible skin attribute (you can now use either full size, compact, or icon sizes), and you can optionally use the article’s excerpt as the content of the bodytext attribute.

Drop me a line if you have any questions, comments, or bug reports.

It’s been exactly six months and a day since Textpattern 4.0.4 was released. I don’t know what took me so long, but I finally upgraded my installation this morning and it was perfectly smoothly, as always¹.

In the process, I’ve started upgrading some of my installed plug-ins to those that support, and take full advantage of, Textpattern 4.0.4. I especially like that tru_tags has, “Added some fancy javascript tricks and UI enhancements to make admin-side tagging easier.” Way cool!

I look forward to taking advantage of some of the new plug-in functionality and using some of the other great new plug-ins that have been cropping up recently. You’ll probably see some new features popping up around here soon.

On a related note, I have also now personally qualified both mta_article_id and mta_digg_it for Textpattern 4.0.4 (although I already knew they worked).

¹ The Textpattern team does an especially good job with keeping major upgrades seamless.

I’ve updated my mta_digg_it Textpattern plug-in to v0.2 today.

This version includes the following fixes:

1. Correctly escapes apostrophes, quotes, backslashes, etc., when used in the title or bodytext attributes (pulled from the article title by default).
2. Prevents cross-pollination of variables when multiple “Digg This” buttons appear on a single page.

The latest version and full description can always be found on the development page or you can download it directly:

mta_digg_it-0.2.txt

As always, please let me know if you have any questions, comments, or bug reports.

I happened across the fact that Digg has implemented new ‘smart’ digg buttons on the 6th. The biggest new feature here is that you no longer have to first ‘submit’ an article to get its “digg url” to use with the “Digg This” buttons and can now just reference the article’s permalink instead.

With that, it means you no longer have to manually submit articles to Digg, copy the digg URL into a custom field in Textpattern, and have the “Digg This” button pull the URL from said custom field (or, worst case, paste the JavaScript into each and every article manually).

With this in mind, I decided it was finally feasible to write a plug-in to do this (I almost did it for the digg-url-in-a-custom-field solution). So, here’s version 0.1 of mta_digg_it: mta_digg_it-0.1.txt (full description here).

Please send in your comments, suggestions, and bug reports.

Update: Sorry about the broken link, it should be fixed now.

Update #2: Version 0.2 is now available.