The newest release of Articles Anywhere adds the ability to filter matching all Tags at the same time, to override Image Auto Alt/Title settings, a change to the default results limit, and more.
Articles Anywhere is the powerful Joomla plugin that allows you to insert articles anywhere on your site based on any filters, place specific data (like title, text, images, custom fields, etc) and have full control over how you want to display the articles.
Today, Articles Anywhere 10 has been released, coming with several improvements and fixes, and a (potential) breaking change, as the default setting for the results limit has been changed from none to 100.
Here is what's new in the the latest update, as well as a few more features that were introduced in other recent releases:
Change to Default Result Limit PRO
Previously, in Articles Anywhere there was no default limit to the amount of articles that would be returned by your {articles}
plugin tags. You could set one in the Settings, or in each individual plugin tag, but by default (without touching the options) it would return unlimited results.
This meant that a misconfiguration on large websites could make it load and display thousands of articles at once, thus potentially causing issues with performance and resources usage.
With Articles Anywhere 10 we have now set the default results limit to 100, to avoid unwanted or unforeseen results. This is just the default option, so you can always change it like before. In case you want a higher limit, you can simply change it in the Articles Anywhere Plugin Settings or, of course, individually set it in your {articles}
plugin tags.
Filter Matching All Tags PRO
In this new version we have added the ability to filter by articles where only ALL given tags match, by using a plus instead of comma as a separator.
So far, you have always been able to display multiple articles by their tags. All you need to do is place a tags="..."
attribute in the tag.
By separating tags with a comma, it will show all articles that contain ANY of the tags. In the below example, it will show all articles that either have the Fluffy
OR the Cuddly
tag.
{articles tags="Fluffy,Cuddly"}...{/articles}
Now, you are also able to show articles that contain BOTH tags at the same time.
You can do so by separating the tags with a +
instead. This will show articles that have both the Fluffy
AND the Cuddly
tag.
{articles tags="Fluffy+Cuddly"}...{/articles}
Override Image Auto Alt/Title Settings PRO
Version 9 of Articles Anywhere added the ability to automatically set the Alt and Title Attributes for any [image-...]
tag placed through Articles Anywhere, with options to base them on the image File Name, the Article Title, the Category Title, and more.
The preference can be set for each image type in the Articles Anywhere Plugin Settings.
With Version 10, it can now also be individually overruled for a specific {articles}
tag via a auto_titles="..."
attribute.
When basing the attributes on the image file name, you can also select how they should be Cased (between lowercase, UPPERCASE, Uppercase only the first letter, Uppercase All Words, or Smart Titlecase).
Now, the Case setting can also be individually overruled via a auto_titles_case="..."
attribute.
And more...
Various other improvements and fixes have been made in the recent releases of Articles Anywhere, including:
Use Reserved Field Names PRO
As you probably already know, with Articles Anywhere you can even filter articles by the value of the custom fields. You simply need to use the field name as the attribute key.
Let's say you have a custom field "Number of legs" that has a field name nr-of-legs
and you want to filter down to articles that have this value set to 3
.
But what if a custom field of yours has the name of a reserved attribute already used by Articles Anywhere (for example such as category
or type
)? How can you filter by it?
Now, if your custom field name is called the same as a reserved attribute key already used by Articles Anywhere, you can filter by your custom field with that name by prepending the attribute with a field:
prefix.
For example, this will filter articles by your custom field that has a field name category
with the value set to books
:
{articles field:category="books"}...{/articles}
Alt. Single Quotes Syntax PRO
Another change made recently makes it possible to also place plugin and data tag attribute values in single quotes instead of double quotes.
This can be useful when used inside html attribute values. Let's make an example.
For certain custom field types, if you want to output the raw value as saved in the database, you can use the output="value"
attribute. This will make it output the option values instead of the names.
[habitat_area] => Asia
[habitat_area output="value"] => as
Here is an example of how you could use both the name and value of the custom field - using the raw value as a class name:
<div class="habitat-[habitat_area output="value"]">[habitat_area]</div>
However, when saving this, your editor might mess up the code because of the nested quotes.
So you can now work around this issue by using output='value'
with single quotes instead:
<div class="habitat-[habitat_area output='value']">[habitat_area]</div>
This will result in:
<div class="habitat-as">Asia</div>
Other improvements and fixes
- Changes some number fields in the settings to also show a range slider
- Fixes issue with [input:...] data fields not return empty when not being set
- Fixes issue with custom field data tags sometimes outputting the raw data when also used in if checks PRO
- Fixes issue with layout="true" attribute on custom fields Data Tags not working correctly PRO
- Fixes issue with output of image tags with attribute output="value" or clean="true" not taking into account the resizing PRO
- Improves handling of nested {article} and {articles} tags
- Prevents cache being used when Joomla debugging is switched on
Read the Changelog for Articles Anywhere for the full list of improvements and fixes that have been made in the new releases.
For a complete overview of all the features included in Articles Anywhere, head over to the full Documentation, and check out the Video Tutorials.