[solved] Can Ditto display the first 3 paragraphs of [+summary+]? YES

Hello,

I am wanting to use Ditto to display the first 3 paragraphs of news items on a site I am building but am not sure how to limit it to paragraphs only.

I see in the documentation it talks about truncating - the code below shows truncating to 400 characters - but this cuts words off mid sentence.

Is there a way to limit the [+summary+] to the first 3 paragraphs? Either that, or to stop the words from being cut off during the summary and and add ’...’ at the end of the last word?

My Ditto Call is as follows:


My template is as follows:


Also I have created a TV called newsDate which is the date of the news release (not the date created):
a. is it possible to sort the news items by the newsDate TV? and;
b. how do I display it in the ditto summary - at the moment no date is included because I guess it is a TV from another page?

Thanks so much in advance - I really, really appreciate it.

See http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,34709.msg210786.html#msg210786 


a and b ---> &orderBy=`newsDate DESC` then in ditto template [+newsDate+]

Thanks mrhaw - the TV inserting / sorting is fixed - thanks for that.

I think you might have misunderstood my initial query.

Rather than limiting the number of words to a specific number - or the number of characters to a specific number - I want to limit the number of paragraphs to 3 per news item.

(in this situation: different news items would have different length paragraphs, and a different amount of paragraphs)

In other words, I want the [+summary+] to display the entire content in the first 3 paragraphs for each news item (eg after 3 </p> tags in the [content] area.

So if the content for one news item is:
<p>blah blah blah 1</p>
<p>blah blah blah 2</p>
<p>blah blah blah 3</p>
<p>blah blah blah 4</p>
<p>blah blah blah 5</p>

I want the summary to display:
<p>blah blah blah 1</p>
<p>blah blah blah 2</p>
<p>blah blah blah 3</p>

Rather than limiting characters:
<p>blah blah blah 1</p>
<p>blah blah bl</p>

or limiting words:
<p>blah blah blah 1</p>
<p>blah blah...</p>

Any ideas on how to do it for the first 3 paragraphs for each news item?

You can use the summary &truncAt and manually ad the splitter to your document. So after the 3rd paragraph you could add <!--splitter-->.

Another option would be to create a plugin to add <!--splitter--> after the 3rd instance of the </p> by using regex. I may be overcomplicating but like everything in MODx there are many ways to accomplish.

Thank you kindly for your suggestion smashingred.

Manual, whilst an option, will be tricky and cumbersome for the client to maintain and remember each time they create a new news item. Also given MODx is such a genius, dynamic would be better.

I like the sound of what you are saying re regex (create a plugin to add <!--splitter--> after the 3rd instance of the </p> by using regex) but unfortunately I have absolutely no idea how to implement what you are talking about (I am a css’er).

Further to mrhaw’s link on http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,34709.msg210786.html#msg210786%C2%A0:

If limiting the number characters is this:



And limiting the number of words is this:


Any ideas on the phx (or equivalent) for limiting the number of paragraphs?

Or the way to create a plugin to add <!--splitter--> after the 3rd instance of the </p> by using regex?

Thanks again in advance.

All the best.

Did you ever work this out? I’m still struggling with trying to limit paragraphs.

There must be a simple way of using PHx to remove the third <p> and everything that follows?

Hi thehen,

I never worked out a dynamic method (I’m a css’er not a programmer and don’t have a handle on phx or regex).

But I did work out a way with double handling - by manually copying the relevant paragraphs from the "Document content" box and pasting into a template variable.

It takes a bit more time when creating a news item, but at least it works!

I ended up double posting this query in another section because I thought it may have been more relevant there. I have documented the template variable method there:
http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,35723.msg216396.html#msg216396

I hope that helps you in the meantime.

If you ever find out a dynamic method to do it, I would love to know about it.

All the best.

I usually have clients just paste what they want in the summary into the Summary (introtext) field, which is actually what it is originally intended for; in fact Ditto originally by default used that field as its summary text. I nagged the dev team into putting the (summary) bit into the field label because I could never remember what it was called in the database and got sick of having to open the database and look at the field names of the site_content table to remember what to put in the [*introtext*] tags!

thanks for clarifying that sottwell - using introtext is a great idea - I use that for meta keywords though as I don’t like how MODx does keywords (I find it much easier and less finicky just typing the keywords into the introtext field of a document than going to different screens to setup up the keywords and then click / assign per page). I think MODx should have a keywords field for each document rather than the current system.

Quote from: nickf08 at Jun 19, 2009, 05:23 AM

thanks for clarifying that sottwell - using introtext is a great idea - I use that for meta keywords though as I don’t like how MODx does keywords (I find it much easier and less finicky just typing the keywords into the introtext field of a document than going to different screens to setup up the keywords and then click / assign per page). I think MODx should have a keywords field for each document rather than the current system.

I personally use tagged blogging using Ditto and call the tags in the keywords meta. In the description meta I use the introtext - works like a treat. If you have any problems with html tags appearing in the head, you can always use phx:notags.

I’m looking into writing something that removes anything after the last three paragraphs. I will let you know how it goes