Lower the character limit for Announcements summaries.

[HarryAdney]

Is there a way to lower the number of characters displayed in the announcements section on the home page? 

[bear]

Without trying it, I'd guess it's this bit within the announcements.tpl around line 22.

       {if $announcement.text|strip_tags|strlen < 350}
            <p>{$announcement.text}</p>
        {else}
            <p>{$announcement.summary}
            <a href="{routePath('announcement-view', $announcement.id, $announcement.urlfriendlytitle)}" class="label label-warning">{$LANG.readmore} &raquo;</a>
            </p>
        {/if}

Change that "350" and if it's longer than that it should display the "...more" link. Again, it's not tested. 😉

[hanstavo]

1 hour ago, bear said:

Without trying it, I'd guess it's this bit within the announcements.tpl around line 22.

 

       {if $announcement.text|strip_tags|strlen < 350}
            <p>{$announcement.text}</p>
        {else}
            <p>{$announcement.summary}
            <a href="{routePath('announcement-view', $announcement.id, $announcement.urlfriendlytitle)}" class="label label-warning">{$LANG.readmore} &raquo;</a>
            </p>
        {/if}

 

Change that "350" and if it's longer than that it should display the "...more" link. Again, it's not tested. 😉

I used the same thing a while ago, since you its not tested, I have tested it and it does work.

[HarryAdney]

Thanks guys,

I did experiment with that figure before posting - sorry, I should have mentioned that - and at least on my version, it doesn't work. Logically, though, it shouldn't because, the code is looking to see if the whole post is less than 350 characters. If it is, it displays the whole post, otherwise it displays the summary, but the character count for the summary isn't set by that 350 figure. I assume it's hard-coded somewhere, presumably as announcement.summary.

Incidentally, the character count for both announcement summaries is 341, though the word count is different.

[bear]

I wouldn't be surprised if it's hard coded behind the encryption then. Quite a lot of things that probably doesn't need to be is, and that makes things just that much harder. 

[brian!]

15 hours ago, bear said:

I wouldn't be surprised if it's hard coded behind the encryption then. Quite a lot of things that probably doesn't need to be is, and that makes things just that much harder. 

I think it's hard coded at 350 after tags removed - i've never seen a summary string longer than 296, so maybe it's changed to 300... ?

17 hours ago, HarryAdney said:

Incidentally, the character count for both announcement summaries is 341, though the word count is different.

first number on the screenshot is a character count of 'summary'; second is character count of 'text' - top article is a copy&paste of @HarryAdney article.

On 21/10/2018 at 18:54, HarryAdney said:

Is there a way to lower the number of characters displayed in the announcements section on the home page? 

quick way (if you want to reduce the length) would be to just truncate it to x characters (showing last whole word) in the template (would work on both homepage and announcements)...

{$announcement.summary|truncate:150}<br>

ultimately, you could do it as a hook if you wanted to ('summary' is just a truncated stripped version of 'text') - so if you just wanted to reduce it, you could loop through the array and truncate it (similar to above), or if you wanted it longer than 350/300, then you'd just use 'text' as a source and create your 'summary' from that string... though, as you've already edited the template to change the layout, it would probably be simpler just to use the template edit to truncate it.

[HarryAdney]

Awesome solution. I should have looked up the Smarty modifier but didn't even think of it. 

Many thanks.