Technokinetics

Thanks for the suggestion, Doodlebee.

One of my aims with Alt-Link-Text is to let users set up short versions of their titles without having to either edit their theme files or switch to code view in the dashboard. The plugin doesn’t require users to add any HTML or CSS, which is always a good thing.

The plugin can also be used to modify a single navigation link; you don’t have to type in two versions of the title for every page as with your method.

The main concern I have with your approach, though, is that your WP database no longer has the expected structure. The post_title field no longer contains the post title (instead it contains the anchor text), and the post_content field no longer contains only the post content. As someone who believes in accurately labelling data so that it can easily be used in a variety of ways, this makes me uneasy!

It’s difficult to predict exactly what mislabelling the data might do, but here are a couple of knock-on effects:

– Fetching the page title using the_content() rather than the_title() means that any plugin that hooks into the_title() (e.g. to provide a thumbnail image next to it, to truncate it, etc.) is unlikely to work, and any plugin that hooks into the_content() (e.g. to link specified words, etc.) will affect your title too.

– The WordPress developers, in their great wisdom, have decided to apply different filters to page titles and page content. Your title is now being run through the other set of filters. (Whether this matters or not, I honestly don’t know, but it makes sense not to mess with these things without good reason.)

– If you did this with posts, I’d expect an RSS feed to show both your link text as the title, and your title as part of the content.

– If you ever want to insert something between your title and your content (e.g. author info, tags, etc.) this will be tricky, because with your method there’s no such place.

Obviously your method is working well for you at the moment, which is great, but I hope that this at least goes some way to explaining why I think the plugin is worthwhile.

Tim

To get rid of the space, include it in the text to be removed:

preg_replace(‘/Text to be Removed /’,”,$wpdb->escape($item->get_title()))

There’s now a new version of the plugin (v0.4) available for download, which might fix the problem you’re having. If you could give it a go and let me know that would be great. Thanks.

The one known issue with this plugin (where a title to be replaced contains a special character such as “&” or “/” no replacement of any titles takes place) has been resolved in v0.4, which is now available for download.

If anyone is having problems that aren’t fixed by switching to v0.4, then I’d really appreciate an email (to tim @ technokinetics .com) explaining what isn’t working.

If I don’t hear from anyone in the next few days, then I’ll make a v1.0 available in the www.ads-software.com Plugin Directory. Thanks to all who have helped with this.

Tim

This isn’t very elegant, but you could try editing line 601 of wpomatic.php, replacing:

$wpdb->escape($item->get_title())

with

preg_replace(‘/Text to be Removed/’,”,$wpdb->escape($item->get_title()))

I’m not exactly familiar with this plugin (I just downloaded it for the first time), so if this doesn’t work then don’t be too surprised.

Good luck.

(N.B. This will only affect posts fetched after you’ve made the change.)

I may be able to help with this. Could you give a more detailed description of what you’re trying to do? Thanks.

Hi Nibb,

Please drop me an email (tim at technokinetics.com) with a link to your site (and preferably an admin login) and I’ll take a look.

The plugin works absolutely fine on some sites (including James’s now). Hopefully we can work out what’s different about your WP installation that I haven’t taken account of, and get this resolved so that more people can use the plugin.

Thanks,

Tim

Sorry, I’m not quite sure what the problem is.

I’m able to create line breaks in both the Visual Editor (using SHIFT + RETURN) and in the Code View using <br />.

What exactly are you trying to do, how are you trying to do it, and how does it go wrong?

Thanks for helping test this. There’s a known issue with non-standard characters that might be causing your problem. If you contact me off-list then I’m sure we can get this working for you.

If you’re willing to help test a new plugin, Alt-Link-Text lets you use custom title attributes in lists generated using wp_list_pages().

If you’d like to go this route and need any help, then just let me know.

Tim

Hi James,

I can’t recreate the problems you’re seeing, but the point of testing is to pick up on issues that arise with different site setups; this is all very useful.

I’ll be in touch so that I can find out what the specifics are, and fix any bugs before I make this more widely available.

Will post back here when the plugin is ready for general release to wrap up this thread.

Tim

Alternative title attribute support added in v0.3.

N.B. If you just overwrite the old alt-title-text.php file with the new then the alternative title attributes won’t work. The database column used to store alternative title attributes is created when the plugin is activated, so you’ll need to deactivate and reactivate the plugin.

Okay, the version currently available for download (v0.2) can cope with titles including & or /.

Thanks for the help with this.

I can replicate the problem with special characters, and will see what I can do about that.

Other than that, the plugin works fine on the two sites that I’ve used for testing. Could you point me to yours so that I can see what’s still going wrong? Thanks.

Oh yes, adding a custom title attribute option in a later version will be straightforward enough; will add that to the to-do list.

The slug is used to create the page’s url: https://www.yoursite.tld/slug/. Your home page shouldn’t need a slug because it will be at https://www.yoursite.tld/.