The purpose of ubernyms is to allow you configure a set of frequently used abbreviations that will be automatically encoded nicely whenever you use them. The goal is to make them visible in a way that is literate for both humans and computers. In other words: we tag them appropriately for your computer, and expand them as necessary for humans.
The main use for ubernyms is still going to be abbreviations, including acronyms. But you can also use it for other things like:
- Words that you always want linked. For instance, the links to ubernyms are being added by the plugin.
- Short forms of words or phrases or even entire paragraphs that you frequently have to type. The whole text can be placed to replace a single word.
- Pictures or emoticons you use frequently. I have photos show up in my DomTT tool-tips for my kid’s names: Katrina and Mikayla.
Edit: May 6, 2006
I’ve included a full configuration panel this time. No more hacking the plugin source to add abbreviations! Each time you go to the configuration panel there’s 5 empty slots for new definitions, and when you submit those, you get space for 5 more. You can remove definitions by simply deleting their Text or Definition. You can see a partial screenshot of the ubernyms configuration if you’re interested, but there’s not much to see besides long lists of definitions.
There’s a setting for each ubernym that lets you define if it is an acronym, an initialism, just a plain old abbreviation, or simply a replacement or link. And if you’re using the DomTT tool-tips, you can specify additional text (including HTML) to be placed below the main definition.
You can download the zip here, which includes the DomTT script which you can also get here with more details about how to use it and the many features, in case you want to play with the tool-tips. The installation is pretty simple, just unzip, and upload the whole ubernyms folder into your plugins folder.
Edit: May 7, 2006
Note that there’s now an option in the plugin configuration for including the default ubernym CSS, but you can feel free to copy that into your CSS and/or edit it as you see fit.
Edit: May 9, 2006
Incidentally, putting the photos in (as I did with my daughters) is extremely simple a?? without getting into the details of how I actually do it, all you have to do is put the img tag into the Description field, and make sure that you’ve checked the option for using the DomTT tooltips. You can use pretty much any HTML in the descriptions for DomTT, within reason 
. Of course, the images have to be somewhere. You can just upload them to your webhost and link to them there, or just specify an image you already uploaded to flickr. Remember, just put the HTML in, like: <img src="http://static.flickr.com/48/136555658_f0eaa892a9_m.jpg" alt="Sitting in a field of flowers" />
Edit: May 11, 2006
I’ve just released an update of this, no major changes, but it’s now in sync with my HuddledParser plugin so that if you’re using them both, you don’t accidentally get two copies of the DomTT scripts loaded. Aren’t I clever?
Edit: May 13, 2006
I finally fixed a few annoying bugs related to having quotes, single-quotes, and apostrophes in your abbreviations and released ubernym 2.4
Edit: May 14, 2006
I tweaked the javascript and css so that it all validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict, or even XHTML 1.1, but the DomTT javascript still uses a CSS file with those neat rounded-corners and alpha-blending opacity, so it’s CSS won’t validate … which doesn’t really bother me.
Edit July 24, 2006
Here’s a list of things that I still want to do:
- I have in mind to provide a check-box-like way of configuring where the replacements happen. That is: to create a sub-tab in the configuration with a list of most/all the “filter“able portions of WordPress, so people can easily choose NOT to have Ubernyms run on comments (usually that’s not helpful, imho, even though that’s the way I run it on my site right now), or choose to run it on the category list, or whatever … I haven’t looked, but there ought to be a way to get a list from WordPress of all the registered filterable things (since it’s trivial, for instance, to add a filter to my RSS plugin … what if I wanted to run Ubernyms on my RSS output?)
- I still need to investigate the language problems. There seems to be something wrong with the way WordPress is handling foreign-language characters through the option settings table?
- To make this more generic, it would be cool to be able to “create” new “types” of replacements. E.g. Shanta Rohse wants to use it to create links to a glossary, but still use it for other things too, so would like a “glossary term” category. Maybe there could also be an additional setting like the “english” one that allows auto-linking only the first occurrence as per these requests
- It might be interesting to add another feature (as a seperate tab?) specifically to create photo popups. I’m not 100% sure how this would best work … (would there be a way to upload photos, or an AJAX interface to let you select photos from Flickr or Zooomr, or a simple ‘preview’ feature and just a text box where you type the URL to an image). The idea is basically to have the tool create the sort of tooltips I have on my kids names, but without needing to type html into that teeny edit box.
116 Comments
Hi JayKul, I installed your plugin, and I’ve seen some words are getting abbrevated, Really a nice plugin, can you tell me how to add new abbrevations into it
Pretty neat — especially liking the DomTT tooltips stuff. without downloading and trying it out: do you have the acronyms wrapped in some delimiters. i.e., instead of replacing blind text, you look for [tag] or {tag} or something? For speed, it obviously significantly improves the ability of regex processing of a big block of text if you can ‘pre-parse’ for some sub-elements, then walk those one at a time (versus the equivalent, walking each word of the entire content block…).
Just wondering. I’ve seen some text-replacement plugins that bring sites to a crawl, trying to help improve them all..
-d
I finally found out how to add new abbrivation. It was so simple
Thilak: Gotta love plugins with user interfaces, eh?
David: That would break the plugin, in my opinion. The purpose is to make it simple and forgettable. I write about technology a lot, and that means a lot of abbreviations and acronyms. I don’t want to have to manually explain every acronym I write; in fact, I don’t want to even think about it. That’s the purpose here: I don’t have to think about it when I’m writing, I use an acronym the way I would in normal conversation and it automatically shows up in such a way that you can understand it.
Hello
I just installed this – it’s working. It seems better than the acronym plugins that I have used it the past. Much more user friendly. Great work and I send you kudos and thanks.
I am curious to know how to get the photos to appear (like your children’s photos). I am aware it’s a script but I’m not sure what I am suppose to call and where. I looked at the ‘howto’ to the domtooltip page but it didn’t help me much. I don’t know where I am suppose to upload my photos and what-not. Wasn’t sure if they go in the domTT folder or elsewhere?!
I hate askin’ for help but if you have the time, I’d appreciate it if you’d shoot me an email back (or reply to my comment here). I’ll check back. If you don’t have the time – I so understand.
Actually, the photos are simple … without getting into the details of how I actually do it, all you have to do is put the
imgtag into the Description field, and check the boxes for using theDomTTtooltips. Any HTML is actually allowed in there. Of course, you’re right that the images have to be somewhere … you can just upload them to your webhost using any of the usual ways … but all I did was specify an image I had already uploaded to flickr: <img src="http://static.flickr.com/48/136555658_f0eaa892a9_m.jpg" alt="Katrina in a field of flowers" />Well, what do you know. That worked. I had been playing with it amd finally my brain said “Do that!” I was using flickr, too. That was simple and I appreciate you replying back. Everything worked like a charm. Love it – so snazzy. Thank You.
I installed Ubernyms a couple days ago with no problems. I also successfully added a few acronyms and “just links.”
However now the plugin seems to have stopped working. When I add or edit an exisiting entry it is not saved. I have tried all the basic options, Replace Text, Just Link, Acronym and Initials with no luck, they are never saved and when editing an existing one it and the original is gone. My default settings remain checked and have not be changed since installation.
I plan on reinstalling the plugin but thought I would ask for your assistence before taking that step.
Well…doesn’t work for me…tooltips aren’t showing…
Very nice plugin — thanks!
I wonder if there’s any way for it to work with RSS feeds that are being parsed and displayed on a blog as well, or if Ubernyms only runs when there is direct user input. I’m working with the feedList plugin if that’s helpful.
Marc: I really don’t know what could be going on. I just tried playing with mine, and I can’t replicate anything like that. Let me know if you figure out what might be causing the problem (eg: if there’s some breaking text you put in an acronym or something … )
Daniele: is the code getting inserted? I mean, when you turn on the plugin, you should see that acronyms have the tags around them in the source, even if (for whatever reason) the DomTT javascript wasn’t working. For that matter, you could try not using the DomTT option(s) and see if that makes any difference.
Stuart: The simple answer is no, but … it works on the WordPress filter hook system, so if your feed plugin provides a hook, or is outputting through something that does, that would work, but otherwise … You have made me think maybe I should call some hooks (or make up new ones) for my feed plugin.
Hi Jaykul,
excellent little plug-in, thank you!
Just to let you know, it is disabled at the moment, because I may ahve found a bug-ette
If you have a word / phrase such as “Horse’s Mouth” then it seems that ubernyms gets a bit confuzzled, and gives an error:
Warning: preg_replace(): Unknown modifier ‘0’ in /home/www/ottered-designs.com/wp-content/plugins/ubernyms/ubernyms.php on line 410
Anyhow, if it not that, will be interesting to knwo what be happening.
Ady
YAToU YATU YAT’U … It looks like I fixed all of the quotes in acronyms problem. But the problem now is that WordPress will replace the quotes in your text with the “texturized” versions, so the text won’t actually match, so you have to specify entities, or set ubernyms to run before the default wptexturize filter. (not sure what priority you’d have to assign), but you could always UNset the wptexturize one, and then re-set it with a higher number.
The plugin does not validate XHTML 1.1.
Just that, it’s really simple to make it validate.
Hi,
Please correct me, if I am wrong.
I have just uploaded the entire Ubernyms folder into wp-plugin folder and activated Ubernym plugin. I have then created a test entry with few words RSS, PHP, HTML etc. to see its working, but it did not shown anything. The post just shows only text and nothing else.
My guess after reading the above article is, that once the plugin is activated, it will search for all words and will encode them into abbr or acronym tags. In the above case the words RSS, PHP etc. has to be replaced with abbr or acronym tags by defult.
Please advice.
Regards.
Continue from the last post.
I have checked Source of my index.php but could not find reference to either Ubernyms plugins or DomTT tooltips. Do I have to manually enter any reference in index.php or abbr, acronym tags, please advice I cann’t wait to see this lying idle.
And Thanks for the nice work.
Regards,
Stahn: I fixed the javascript inclusion and the base CSS so that (at least on my pages) it validates as XHTML (1.0 transitional, 1.0 strict, or 1.1). However, the DomTT CSS won’t validate, and I don’t really think it’s worth tying to make it do so, since clearly it needs to use Mozilla- and IE-specific rules.
DG: It needs to be in a “ubernyms” (lowercase) subdirectory of your plugins folder. If you activated the plugin, you should have a tab in your plugins control panel that lists the options for configuration. If you select the DomTT and DomTT javascript options … then if you view source on your home page, you should see the DomTT scripts in your
although, my list is rather longer than the default list in the plugin.
headsection. As far as how abbreviations will be rendered, you can see that hereHi Jaykul,
First Thanks for your reply. After writting to you, I had downloaded updated version and configured DomTT and DomTT javascript in option. And I am able to see these in page source.
Still I am not able to see the result of ubernyms i.e. the abbreviated words are not wrapped around abbr or acronym tags.
I have seen these working on your sited. Could you please be kind enough to let me know ‘what could be the casue’?
Regards,
Installed your (great, btw) plugin on wp 2.0.2 with italian language.
All what I got are a lot of warning like:
Warning: Delimiter must not be alphanumeric or backslash in c:\apache\htdocs\wordpressmania\wp-content\plugins\ubernyms\ubernyms.php on line 436
Warning: Delimiter must not be alphanumeric or backslash in c:\apache\htdocs\wordpressmania\wp-content\plugins\ubernyms\ubernyms.php on line 436
I can’t understand the reason… could you help me?
Stefano
i get the same errors as Stefano describes. is this a language thing ?
Stefano, Michael: Hmm. OK .. I guess that is a language thing … [confused1] Here’s what’s happening:
That line calls the regular expression replacement. I used a character as a delimiter for the regular expression which I’ve never seen used anywhere: Az I picked that because that way it never shows up inside the expression (normally one would use / or $, but in my case, I can’t be sure you won’t insert something that needs to use those IN the regular expression). Anyway. I thought I was being clever, but apparently, I was wrong… I’m trying again to be clever, using the A? character, which seems to be present in, at least, all of the European languages (you can re-download)...
But honestly, you can just pick your own character and replace them (there’s four instances of that character), and you need to replace it with a non-alphabetic character that you are not going to use in your abbreviations.
As for the French guy that doesn’t need any more text replacement … that’s fine too [SadGoodBye]
However, even if all you’re using it for is abbreviations, youa??re better off with Ubernyms because it would use the right tag instead of the acronym tag for things like HTML that aren’t actually acronyms. That’s actually why I finally released ubernyms: I added the ability to say that some acronyms need to be spelled out in “English” because they are obscure (to your readers), and you want to place the full text in the article (in parentheses) the first time you use it … which is the correct way to do it. [whip]
Basically, I realized that I’m tired of people arguing about
ABBRvsACRONYM(becauseABBRdoesn’t show up highlighted in IE6) when they should just write it as they would on paper. The tag is for semantics not for display, and it’s there to help computers understand what’s going on (and, for instance, pronounce it correctly for blind people). Of course, I also ended up adding the little DomTT thing for display ... but it’s key (to me) that this is in addition to the semantic tags.yehaaa! just remember: first deactivate it delete the folder ‘ubernyms’, than unpack the zip again; !!! clear your caches !!!
and now it works.
thanks for this wonderful plugin. i’ll now stresstest it against a new projekt i’m currently working on. they’ll use alot acronyms and abbr.
Hi Jaykul,
First Thanks for your reply. After writting to you, I had downloaded updated version and configured DomTT and DomTT javascript in option. And I am able to see these in page source.
Still I am not able to see the result of ubernyms i.e. the abbreviated words are not wrapped around abbr or acronym tags.
I have seen these working on your sited. Could you please be kind enough to let me know a??what could be the casuea???
Regards,
I am still awaiting your feedback. Meanwhile, I have many times re-installed but still it does not display abbr or acronmn.
I am only using default words which comes with plugin like RSS, PHP etc.
DG…
I am loving this script!! Definitely helps with the numerous military acronyms I use often. Though, the designated CSS is not working. I’m not sure why. Still fiddling with it a bit though.
Hey, Jaykul, this is a great thing to have. Do you think it would be very hard to adopt for use in b2evolution? There is Link-A-Word for that, but it’s not as sophisticated (yet?). Thanks for your reply.
Laura: is the
&lt;link...to it showing up? And if so, is it’ssrcattribute right?Lexagon: You could port it for sure. It’s just a regular-expression search-and-replace….
Jaykul — When I view the source… I get this… TAD Obviously, without the spaces… just wasn’t sure if it’d show up with the code in the comments.
Hmmm… that didn’t work… let me try this again… <acronym class=“uttAcronym” title=“Temporary Additional Duty”>TAD</acronym> Asteriks in place.
Hi Jaykul – I’ve just begun exploring your rather remarkable plugin. I am using it in a small way to create auto links to glossary terms. I’ve chosen to style the a.ubernym so that it adds a small icon to indicate a glossary term. But of, course this means that I can’t use Ubernyms for anything else. Is there a better way to do this? http://shantarohse.com/glossary/
Jaykul – I have installed this plugin many time, but still it does not pop-up at abbr or acronyms. I have created a test post with just few words like PHP, RSS, CSS, HTML. But nothing comes up. I have also checked post source, the words PHP, RSS, CSS, HTML were not wraped around abbr or acronym tags.
I am using connection theme.
Can you please advice me ‘what is wrong & why it is not displaying definitions?’
You must have noticed, all the above words are predefined in your Plugin.
Help me! to make it working.
DG…
Jaykul,
i find it a bit unstable in my situation: i found a typo in the class (line 152 the abbr isn’t closed properly), and when i changed it, the plugin produced ‘pregmatch’ errors like the ones described before.
sometimes it doesn’t catch all words, e.g. the german ‘e.V.’ isn’t catched sometimes. and sometimes it does , but only on the first occurance is catched but no further.
Laura: If you have checked the option to use the default CSS, it should put a
&lt;link...tag in your header to include the CSS style sheet, and I’m wondering if maybe that link came out wrong.Shanta: Well, each of the “types” of abbreviations has it’s own style
class, so you could just use one of the types exclusively for that. I would useuttJustLinkwhich is (obviously) the class for “Just Link” items (like the words “acronym” or “ubernyms” on my site) Obviously, the slickest thing would be to add something like “glossaryTerm” to the list … but that would require some hacking in the pluginDG: I had a look at your site … and it’s clear that the plugin’s inserting the DomTT script and css into your header, and yet, not applying any acronyms. Two thoughts: 1) are you using an output-caching plugin which might interfere? 2) are you using another acronym plugin? (because I noticed that RSS, CSS etc are being marked as “abbr” but without the CSS classes that uberbyms should add).
Michal: You’re right about the typo, I fixed that (and a whole bunch of validation errors), but I don’t know how it could be related to instability. As far as catching certain words sometimes, but not others: that’s almost certainly because of how the regular expression is written. The fact is that I wrote that carefully to try to avoid replacing abbreviations inside code … and it may be too careful for certain things. It expects word boundries (punctuation, white space) on either side of the abbreviation, and it can’t be followed by a colon “:” ... so “e.g.:” would not work, but “e.g. “ would, for instance. You can try removing the colon restriction (I can’t remember why it’s there, but I know I had a reason — in HTML plus English).
I’m curious as to why the (link) shows up on various ubernym displays on this site but is not clickable. For example if I use CSS or HTML keywords in my post, the ubernym explaination that pops up on mouseover says (link) at the end yet is not clickable. Is this not confusing for users? I know I’ve spent at least a couple of minutes trying to figure out how I’m supposed to get my mouse down to click on the (link) text. This was of course after i tried just clicking HTML and CSS, noticing that they do not go anywhere.
Am i missing something or does anyone else find that this may be a little confusing for site visitors?
> and it may be too careful for certain things
well i thought so.
> so a??e.g.:a?? would not work
but > e.g.
DG: I had a look at your site a?? and ita??s clear that the plugina??s inserting the DomTT script and css into your header, and yet, not applying any acronyms. Two thoughts: 1) are you using an output-caching plugin which might interfere? 2) are you using another acronym plugin? (because I noticed that RSS, CSS etc are being marked as a??abbra?? but without the CSS classes that uberbyms should add).
Jaykul – 1. No, I am not using an output-caching plugin or anyother cache’s. I have disable cache and even removed wp-cache directory from wp-content.
2. No, I am not using any other plugin to output acronym. Yours is the very first plugin and would remain on my site, once configured.
3. The marked “abbr” and “acronym”, which you have seen are manually entered by me, while creating a post. As the ubernyms is not yet configured. so, I am manually entering, i.e. the reason I want to make ubernymns functioning as soon as possible.
As, I had written to you earlier, that after installing ubernyms, I had created a test post fir the built-in words. But it does not add class inside the Post. so I am still manually entering.
Please, help me getting this nice work of your working at my site.
Regards, DG…
Kevin: Hmm. Those should be clickable… the tooltips were dissapearing on mouse-out instead of being sticky. Apparently the documentation on the DomTT script was in error, and I hadn’t noticed. Anyway … I fixed it by modifying the DomTT javascript. (I added “domTT_type” as a global setting for the per-tooltip “type” setting).
Michael: Just to be clear, I don’t have “e.g.” in my abbreviation list (it’s a common-enough abbreviation that if someone didn’t know what it meant, they would probably need a dictionary to read my posts anyway).
DG: I’m honestly at a bit of a loss. My suggestion would be that you:
DG: Ia??m honestly at a bit of a loss. My suggestion would be that you:
download the latest copy
Jaykul – downloaded from http://www.huddledmasses.org/wp-content/plugins/ubernyms.zip
deactivate ubernyms
DG: Deactivated
delete the ubernyms folder
DG: Deleted entire folder
upload the new copy
DG: Uploade from the fresh downloaded i.e. v2.6
reactivate ubernyms
DG: Reactivated, and the problem remain same, nothing displayed
send me a link to that test post
DG: Post Link : http://www.roks.xmgfree.com/blog/2006/05/23/test-post-for-ubernyms-plugin/
Jaykul – One thing, I have noticed toady and earlier also, I had many times “ deactivated, deleted, fresh uploaded 7 re-activated plugin. But the configuration of the first time installation of the plugin in ubernyms configure shows up again. Where as, after removing these configuration should also get removed. And at the next re-activation, deafult plugin configuration should be displayed.
Please look and advice me, as I am dead serious now to get it up and running.
And also would like to say Sorry! to you for all the botherations, I am giving to you.
Regards, DG…
I’m curious: does this plugin still work if allow_url_fopen is disabled? My hosting site does so, so anything I want to use needs to use CURL or else be easily convertible to CURL equivalents. So I thought I would ask (and if the answer is “no”, then perhaps you might be interested in converting it to use curl (a safer & more secure method, anyway).
Thanks. The demo of it on this page just blows me away, I particularly like the ones that come up for your children!
—Cindy
Hi Jaykul,
Finally, I have been able to get Ubernyms is working alongwith DOmTT tool tips.
Thanks for all your help and also Sorry! for botherations given to you.
Just wanted to ask you, is it possible to disable default browser tool tip. As this tips are currently covering DomTT pop-up.
Regards,
DG…
Hey, I’m testing ubernyms but it won’t take accentuated characters. It either badly encodes them into garbled shite, or refuses to see I am putting É to get a A? for instance.
Cindy: Ubernyms doesn’t use any network code at all; the photos are just embedded as img tags witht he source pointing to Flickr…
DG: Congrats!
Sadly, Firefox (which is the only browser that I know of that has this tooltip problem) doesn’t provide any way to disable the tooltips. That’s why I put a checkbox in Ubernyms to not use the “title” attribute when I’m using DomTT: because it gets in the way.
FranA?ois/phnk: Not sure what to tell you about that, I noticed it happening with a couple of characters when I was testing, but I don’t know why! (If anyone reading this knows something about PHP and/or mySQL that might cause this, I’d appreciate a hint…).
Well, if I ask AMA to become “A mon avis”, the A letter will get garbled. I guess the file or table in which the ubernyms data are stored should be encoded as UTF-8 for it to work properly with ASCII>128 chars.
The tooltips are very cool, but they vanish before I finish reading them (the really long ones) even though I don’t move the mouse.
I just installed this plugin and I must say it’s fantastic! However, I’m also having some problems with how the CSS is rendering. My titles show up as a wide white stripe with no text, instead of the way it works on this site. I don’t have the problem with acronyms without a description, so I’m assuming it’s a clash between my stylesheet and the ubernyms stylesheet only in the way titles are rendered. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
thank you very much for this plugin, its nice to see it in action!
I can’t get it to work I get an error 403 when I try to go to the configuration page
Great plugin, thank you!
I noted that Swedish chars, such as A?,A?,A? gets messed up if you write them in the definition or description fields. Any ideas?
I also noted the bug you have commented on in the code, about links ending up within links. Do you have any approach on how to fix that issue? It’s the only issue really bothering me with this great plugin!
Best regards,
BjA?rn
Not sure what’s going on with Starry’s … and I actually don’t know how you could get an access forbidden page from the config unless you don’t have login access to the wordpress admin.
As far as the links issue, the only complete answer I know is to set all your acronyms to replace, and set the trigger text with brackets around it, like [PK] being the text that gets replaced with PK and being tagged as an acronym … that way it won’t ever grab text you didn’t mean for it to grab.
Hello, I love the idea of ubernyms. However, I am having a small problem where the tooltips do not render properly. I am using WP_ItemStats as well and whenever both plugins are activated, the tooltips render at the absolute top left corner (0,0) of the website. I’ve tried with and without the DomTT versions of the tooltips.
I am using PortableFirefox (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4) Gecko/20060508 Firefox/1.5.0.4) for the most part. IE renders my test post with no problems, but I’d prefer not to use it
Hello,
Thank you for the great plugin. I am working on using it as a glossary (in combination with wp-snap), and it works like a charm.
I wonder, however, if there is a way to auto-link only the first occurence of a word on a page, so if you use that word/abbreviation several times, you don’t end up with tons of links? If this is possible, I’d love to hear how to do it.
Thanks
Jaykul,
This is really wonderful. Been looking for somethig like this for a while. Way to go.
Like Nic, I’m also interested in atuo-linking only the first occurence of a word, but this time on a post as opposed to page.
I’d really like to know if it can be done and how.
uruloki: Well, I have no idea why it wouldn’t work. Especially if you disable DomTT, since at that point, they’re just regular, browser-generated tooltips on acronyms. Do you have a link to an example page where the problem manifests (your page looks like it’s working, but it’s obviously not using DomTT)
Nic, Luminus: It’s possible … but it would take some modifications to the plugin.
Basically, if you set “English” true, you’ll see that the plugin puts the full text in parenthesis after the first occurence of the word in a post (NOTE: if it gets re-used in comments, it gets full-text the first time in each comment. I can’t figure out how to stop that).
This behaviour could be modified slightly: say, add a “MarkOnce” feature like the “English” one. Then exclude those from the first loop so they don’t get linked at all. Finally, copy the “English” loop and change it for “MarkOnce” so you process it seperately (exactly the same as the English processing, except, link them up instead of putting the text in parenthesis after).
With the current plugin, the only thing you could do would be to disable the styling, and the DomTT, and then use the “English” style. Feel free to code the links straight into the description…
Hey Jaykul,
Your plugin is the greatest thing ever for tooltips. There are just two things, IMHO, that are in it’s way to being the greatest thing ever for anything:
1) Messes up if used in a UTF-8 blog. Not only the text gets affected, but also the replacement if you try something like enclosing the text to be replaced in []s.
2) Only owrks inside posts. I know this may be difficult to change, but if one uses it to create tooltips, the tooltips in the sidebar, header and footer will not be domtt-like, they will be regular ones, thus breaking the site visual unity.
I hope these two points get your attention, because your plugin is highly configurable and flexible!
I’d like to ammend my comment above.
Looking in the code more carefully (not that i know how to code), i see that the plugin should work with the sidebar content too. What about the content in the header and the footer, are there hooks for this?
Also, there seem to be no DB functions of the plugin itself, just get_option() and update_option() which i think are WP functions. I posted in WP foruns ( http://wordpress.org/support/topic/79991 ) about it. Can this be corrected by the plugin, or do we need to file a bug in WP’s bugtracker?
Thanks Jaykul.
Hey again Jaykul,
So i have done some more testing with the international characters problem. I found this thread in the WP foruns: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/77286 , and i followed the instructions successfully. I have a local copy of my website for testing, where i am trying to get your plugin to work.
Now my local website is completely UTF-8ized, including the WP connection to the database as instructed in the above cited thread, but ubernyms is still not working in two ways:
- It seems the characters [ and ] break the text-matching. The text i specify to be replaced is enclosed in brackets, and it is not replaced, instead text that has nothing to do with it is (like single letters for example); – And the text that should be in the tooltips, which would include chinese characters, is unreadable (full of weird letters). I checked the field ubernyms_collection in the database and it seems the text for the tooltips is being stored as HTML entities, which obviously can’t deal with non-english languages apropriately.
Please, please, will you make your plugin UTF-8 compatible? We non-english speakers need it so badly!
Thank you,
Eduardo
Things were looking good for this plugin. No fuss, flexible. Very nice.
I was to try one more thing and then comment with a pat on the head for you…. but…I started playing with ‘replacing text, specifically making ‘Google’ automagically link to the website.
I got these:
WordPress database error: [Got a packet bigger than ‘max_allowed_packet’]
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ‘a:44:{i:5;O:7:\“ubernym\”:7:{s:4:\“type\”;s:10:\“uttAcronym\”;s:4:\“abbr\”;s:3:\“AIM\”;s:4:\“text\”;s:21:\“AOL Instant Messenger\”;s:11:\“description\”;s:79:\“The most popular instant messaging service was originally for AOL members only.\”;s:7:\“english\”;b:0;s:8:\“makeLink\”;s:0:\”\”;s:10:\“appendLink\”;s:18:\“http://www.aim.com\”;}i:6;O:7:\“ubernym\”:7:{s:4:\“type\”;s:10:\“uttAcronym\”;s:4:\“abbr\”;s:4:\“AJAX\”;s:4:\“text\”;s:31:\“Asynchronous Javascript And XML\”;s:11:\“description\”;s:35:\“How we make web-pages truly dynamic\”;s:7:\“english\”;b:1;s:8:\“makeLink\”;s:0:\”\”;s:10:\“appendL….
and so on.
Whoops.
Any hints?
I think I tracked it down. It wasn’t the google thing, it was to do with this picture:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/murky/205551683/
It had an é in the alt. (I think that was the issue). (Description Box)
Deleting this entry did the trick
All now seems well, a couple of queries remain:
1) With the DomTT switched on, I’ve read about how I could manually call the script and configure things like delay etc, but that sort of misses the point, it’d be nice if I could do that within Ubernyms (ideally, display until not hovering anymore)
2) Weirdness happens with an embedded video, the tooltip appears behind the video: http://www.murky.org/blg/category/entertainment/television/battlestar-galactica/
Neither of these is a deal-breaker, but both are annoyances and a work-round would be nice!
Cheers!
Regards,
Hey, glad you figured out that error, I was rather confused, and was going to ask how many ‘nyms you had set up…
There does seem to be a problem with unicode in the WordPress plugin config, but I just don’t have any ideas what to do about it.
Yeah, it might be nice to put all the domTT options somewhere, but honestly … there’s just so many of them that I just really don’t have the time to come up with a reasonable UI and storage scheme for it.
As far as video … it’s because of the way that YouTube has you embedding them. The domTT script looks for ‘object’ or ‘select’ items to hide/avoid them, but it skips objects that have nested embed tags … according to the script comments it’s because of “flashing” issues, I haven’t investigated further.
Possible new bug:
There doesn’t seem to be any check, when adding a link, as to if that text is already in a link (I haven’t done a similar test for abbr or acronym tags.
This can end up with [url][url]text[/url][/url]
The quick and dirty fix is to add a space before the text being searched for. This won’t suit every situation, of course, much better for ubernyms to check if the text is already linked (or has acronym tags)
Regards,
Hey Jaykul,
Yes the problem seems to be with UTF8. The characters are stored in the database field as html entities, which don’t deal apropriately with UTF8. Isn’t there a way to convert the characters to UTF8 hexadecimal codes (or the like), and then back when echoing them to the posts? This would need to be done for the text to be searched and for the text to be replaced too.
About the domTT options: i would suggest creating just one single input field in the plugin config page so that the user can write all his domTT options in there, and usnig the user’s input in that one field to when calling domTT. That puts the burden of reading some domTT docs on the user, but it is better than having the user edit the plugin files directly, YMHO.
Also, the [ and ] characters are currently messing up the regex, it seems.
I found this plugin, Ultimate Tag Warrior, which stores text strings much like Ubernyms does in the database – just UTW stores UTF-8 correctly. I wouldn’t know how it does the trick, but maybe UTW’s author can offer a suggestion. The URI is: http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/
Is there a way to stop ubernyms from adding a link if the word is already within a link tag?
I am using ubernyms in conjunction with wp-snap to create a glossary, and that works splendidly. However, when i try to add some of those words as technorati tags, both ubernyms and the SimpleTag plugin add a link around the word, causing no end of havock.
I’m not sure how to make it so ubernyms doesn’t create a link if the word is already surrounded by the tag. Any ideas or suggestions?
Hello. This is probably going to be the oddest comment you’ve gotten about ubernyms, which is a terrific plugin. I’m using Ubernyms on a production site that runs php 4.4.2 and MySQL 4.1.18. I have been testing a database dump and restore on mac that runs php 4.4.1 and MySQL 4.1.21. When I reload the database on the mac, the ubernyms collection is not properly unserialized. For some reason, it is not detected as an array. What’s odd is that all the other serialized values are correctly unserialized, including the ubernyms setting variables. Has anyone else seen this, or do you have any idea why this might be happening? I’ve testing it and it definitely seems to be that when the values are loaded from the database, it’s not detected as being an array. I’ve looked at the changelogs for PHP and MySQL and I’m not seeing anything immediately that would seem to cause this. It’s not the end of the world if I can’t make this work, but it’s the last thing between me and being able to have an up-to-date copy of the production site running on a backup. Any ideas appreciated.
is it possible to get ubernyms to highlight words which show up in ‘the_meta’ as well? i edited ubernyms.php and added this line at the bottom:
add_filter(‘the_meta’, ‘ubernyms_replacer’, 18);
but it still doesn’t work. i’m wondering if there’s another way…
thanks!
Whats the plugin for the rollover help boxes?
That’s the DomTT tool-tips that I mentioned in the article.
Hey Joel,
Is there any progress on the i18n problem?
I am having a problem with the placement of the Tool Tip. At first I thought the plugin wasn’t working, but then I noticed that the text box is appearing in the far upper left corner of my website, (0,0) instead of under my cursor, as it appears on your site. Is this a CSS issue? If so, can you tell me what you did to get it to appear under your cursor?
I am using this plugin on a wpmu installation, and other than the positioning issue, it works fine.
I have spoken too soon. It’s not working on WPMU, except on the front blog. The other blogs simply store the setting in the main blogs options. Since I really like this plugin, I will see if I can figure out how to store the options in (and read from) the right place. I’m not very sophisticated at php, so don’t know how successful I will be.
I would still like to know how to get the placement of the TT correct.
Got the popup showing in the right place.
Got it working in WPMU. Here are the two small changes needed if you are interested. It should still work fine in regular WP with these.
function ubernyms_make_config_page() {
if ( function_exists(‘add_submenu_page’) )
add_submenu_page(‘plugins.php’, ‘Ubernyms Configuration’, ‘Ubernyms Configuration’, 1, basename(__FILE__), ‘ubernyms_config_page’);
change basename(__file__) to file
“>
“>
Sorry about that. I guess the code tag doesn’t work here.
The second section that needs to change is your form post method. Change action to: echo $_SERVER[“REQUEST_URI”];
That’s all. It works like a charm!
I love this plugin, but I guess I have bad luckwith it, it seems to not work when another wp plugin is activated, AJAX Comments 2.0!
In IE there’s an error message, “object doesn’t support this action” and in the page source both Ubernyms and AJAX Comments 2.0 scripts are called twice.
Any idea? thanks
I just love the plugin. I’d really love it to work with other languages than English though. It fuddles up anything that has to do with accents and diacritical marks. I use it on a French blog to make it easier to read for my English speaking readers… and have to suppress accents or find other synonyms. Not so easy sometimes! Maybe in a next release???
Is there a way to make Ubernyms ignore the “read more” link?
I have mine set up to include the entry title (eg: Continue Reading “How to Build a Better Mousetrap”). I might want a definition for “mousetrap” in the entry body, but not in the text of the “read more” link.
Re. making Ubernyms ignore the read more link.
Well, the simplest answer is that Ubernyms really ought not to parse text in links anyway, but I still haven’t solved the problem of how to get that to work along with all the other regular expressions.
Re. UTF-8 and other languages.
This is on my todo list. I’ve been sort-of stalling on it because I believe it is a WordPress bug, not something specific to my plugin. I’m going to have a look around to see what I can do to help get it fixed.
Thanks for this really helpfull Plug-In. I use it on my Website – but have Problems with the so called Umlauts HTML: ä for example… wenn this ist not translated. If I have some minutes I will have a look at your code and give you an hint how to handle this
Hey Jaykul,
Re. UTF-8 and other languages.
Nice, thank you for your effort. We are keeping an eye on that because your plugin seems to be the best all-around text replacer and tooltips solution, it is indeed very complete. If it comes to handle UTF-8, it will be an unbeatable package.
Hi,
I just upgraded to WP 2.1 and installed ubernyms. After I had created a few new entries I decided to change the styles to match the site styles. I did this but it only affected entries made after the changes were made.
On this page http://www.owenkelly.net/2007/01/24/wordpress-21/ the word WordPress is a “text replace” made after I removed the underline from the css and unchecked DomTT. On the other hand UTW was entered before I removed DomTT, and it still has underlining and still shows the help cursor.
So I looked to find where the entries were stored, thinking the information had been stored at the time of creation. Then I realised you weren’t using a database table to store them. Where are the user defined entries stored? And how do I remove the styling once it is applied?
I know I could remove the entries and re-enter them. I am asking this now though in case I want to change my style sheets at some point in the future when I have 200 entries
Which is an oblique way of saying that I think ubernyms is going to join UTW as an absolutely indispensible plug-in for me. Many thanks.
Owen
Oh, and while I am here, I would be very happy to have an additional feature. I would like “Replace Text with tooltip” as an option which would replace the text with the definition, add a link, and then show the description in the tooltip.
Then I could tip “reg”, have this changed into “the Register” as a link, with “biting the hand that feeds IT” showing as a tooltip when the reader hovers over the link.
Could you add that some time, please? Unless of course there are secret reasons for not including it
Cheers,
Owen
Owen:
My guess is that you missed a spot in the CSS file (they’re different):
abbrtag with the class “uttAbbreviation”And there’s no reason that I can remember for not allowing tooltips on the replace type. I’ll try to get to that.
Nills
I think the Umlauts is more of the UTF-8 stuff…
For some reason, the download link doesn’t seem to be working at present. http://www.huddledmasses.org/wp-content/plugins/ubernyms.zip gives a “page not found” error.
sigh I fixed the download link … (I moved wordpress into it’s own directory, and for some reason, I’ve got all my plugin downloads inside wp-content).
Is there a place where I can set the time the DomTT tooltip is showing? I have pretty large texts in there and it is not possible to read it all before de tooltip disappears.
Also, due to these long texts, it would be nice to place them in a rather large textarea instead of an input field.
Otherwise very cool plugin. Keep on the good work!
Yes, in the DomTT script (and thus, in the initialization of it in my script) there are many settings for it. I thought about putting all the DomTT options into the control panel, but I was just too lazy.
Thx, I’ ll have a look at them. I allready tried some of them out, but without result. Must have chosen the wrong settings.
HI, Love the plugin and have been using for a while now. I have a record of an on-line game and am using this for tagging glossary items. It was working fine, but when I try and add an 84th “Just Link” it will not add the link. Have you seen a limit in the code somewhere. I cannot find any limit and am wondering if it might be a total size limitation on the database entry. Thoughts?
Hello,
I’ve got Ubernyms install and working, but it does not seem to work if the item is part of a <LI>. Is all text of a post parsed or are there restrictions?
That’s odd ..
I can see the ubernyms working 100%. Using Firefox latest here.
Please don’t quit! I have been praying daily for an update that works with UTF8… Seems it has been done before, please see my comment above about Ultimate Tag Warrior.
Thanks very much for this plugin which I’ve just installed on a new version of my site. I just wanted to throw in my two cents about UTF-8 and accents. I’ve had WordPress blogs running in French for many years now (and even b2 before that). The only way I’ve found to get accents to work properly is to change the caracter set to ISO-8859-1. As you can see in this post http://www.axia-consultants.com/?p=23, the plugin works fine for me with no hassle at all.
Yes, WP works fine, as it does for me in UTF-8. But there is no Ubernyms-substituted words in the page you provided that contain accents!
Now, after years using WP in UTF-8, changing back to ISO is not an option anymore, lots of other things would break.
I’ve seen it mentioned in more than one place that Ubernyms does not play well with WP 2.1.3, etc. I realize what a pain it is trying to figure out what has gone wrong, and everything else, but I really would like to be able to use this plugin with the domTT script. As it stands right now, that’s not an option.
I guess I’m just curious, since you mentioned it’s not fun trying to keep plugins updated – is there anything that could make it fun?
Yeah, I’ll be fixing it in the next couple of weeks, because I use it too … I had a couple ideas about additional ways it could be used, so I’m going to add those in too.
I just want to thank you for this cool plugin! Got it working like a charm! However, whenever I hover over one of my ubernyms, the title appears on top of the definition, like as if it has an alt tag within and covers the proper cool title. Sorry I cant explain it really well
Thank you!
Sadly, that’s a stupid browser trick: Firefox insists on showing the “title” attribute in a tooltip.
If you don’t check off the option in Ubernyms that’s labeled “Don’t use the title attribute” then the script does the semantically correct thing: setting the title attribute on the abbr tags — without that, they’re not really useful semantically. However, if all you want is the pretty DomTT tooltips, then you should check it off so they look pretty to people, regardless of how they look to machines.
Thanks very much, Joel! Got it working now! _ thumbsup
Hi Joel, Ubernyms seems to “break” AJAX functionality within the K2 theme. If you need to see an example of how exactly it does so, take a look at my website; the search bar is an AJAX-enabled search, it should search automatically three seconds after you’re finished typing, but it doesn’t do that with Ubernyms enabled. That’s one example, anyway.
Any idea on what exactly is conflicting, and if possible, how to fix it?
Yeah, domLib (the fancy tooltips javascript) creates a “Hash” class, and so does Prototype … the autosearch function you’re using uses a feature of “Hash” that is in the Prototype version but not the DomLib version. You might fix the problem by adjusting when the scripts are loaded, but you could definitely fix it by not using the DOM ToolTips.
If just switching order doesn’t work, and you really want the domLib feature, the domLib could be refactored to work alongside Prototype…
Of course… my dynamic “AJAX” auto-search script works fine with the domLib, so … I’m not quite ready to put that much work into it (I’d be more inclined to consider a different, Prototype-based, tooltip javascript).
I see, sounds like a lot of work. The K2 theme’s Advanced Navigation and even its Live Commenting features also appear to be affected by that, upon further testing. It seems the easiest way out of this while still keeping Ubernyms intact (the plugin is that important to me, heh)is to disable the AJAX on K2.
Thanks, Joel.
Thank ya much, Joel! It looks stunning…
..but I can’t get it to work. I’m running the latest wordpress and tried disabling all the other plugins (because there are many) but there was no conflict. I always get the same error message on top of each post:
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/www/web9/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ubernyms/ubernyms.php on line 366
i don’t dare fiddling with your code (further I dont know what I’m doing most of the time) so any help would be appreciated because it’s just the frickin’ best plugin on earth so far!
so thanks in advance!
regards
phil
Hey,
I was wondering if there was a possibility of implementing this into Blogger?
If there is, or there is a similar plug-in for Blogger please let me know via my email
mlevit@gmail.com
Thanks
Is there a way to change the colour of the abbreviations that show up on the blog? Right now it’s green but it would be nice to be able to change it to whatever colour we want.
I am using http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress for importing RSS feeds, and am trying to use ubernyms as well. It doesn’t seem to work when the feeds are imported. Does your plugin only work when the posts are entered manually? I tried editing the posts and that doesn’t seem to work either. I’m using the latest version of Wordpress.
Thank you.
david
Strangely enough, when I deactivate this plugin (feedwordpress) the ubernyms starts working. I don’t get it.
I’de like to know if this plugin can replace custom field text?
I’m trying to now and I get nothing, should this be working?
Well, hypothetically you can replace text anywhere, but you’d have to add the appropriate hook for the output (or input, I guess), because right now it only hooks the content, comment, and “sidebar content” ...
Hi,
I have been using Ubernyms as a key part of my site for about at least a year now. The one feature I would dearly like is to switch it off for all headings – etc.
Are you still planning to add filters? If not can you suggest some pointers as to where in your code I should look to add them?
Cheers
Owen
hi,
I have pb after copying pasting from
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/d/deep_link.htm
A hyperlink either on a Web page or in the results of a search engine query to a page on a Web site other than the site’s home page.
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /ubernyms/ubernyms.php on line 217
Has anyone tested Ubernyms with Wordpress 2.5 yet? Does it work?
Hi, Joel, a long time ago I posted that ubernyms doesn’t work for me… and I sorted out why. It conflicts entirely with the WP Lightbox 2 plugin. If I disable Lightbox, it works as it’s supposed to.
A shame, because I enjoy both plugins very much.
I’ve used it with 2.5 (just upgraded the other day), Michael, and it’s been working fine for me so far. Thank goodness, since I rely on it rather heavily.
Hello,
Thank you so much for this amazing plug-in. I am having an issue however, as mentioned up there before, in the Ubernyms config, it won’t allow me to save new/edited words.
I tried both adding new ones, and changing the other ones, but when I save it it does not actually change anything. I even checked the folders and it has the correct 755 read/writing/execute.
Is there something I am doing wrong?
I deactivated/removed/installed/activated the most current version with no change.
Thank you so very much!
Yes, use the “English” option to only replace the first instance of an acronym, in accordance with normal English writing rules
Hi, I want to use your plug-in for a website I am developing for dental students. Is it possible to include the acronym only once on a page ? since I have the same word repeated over and over in a page.
Thanks
Hi and thanks for your reply. I tried it and it didn't work.I set English option to True. Another issue I am having is that when I enable Ubernyms then Live-search Popup plug-in stops working. I don't know if it is Ubernym's fault or Lve-search Popup fault. I am contact both developers to see if there's solution. Maybe you can help ?
Thanks for your quick reply. Let me know how I can get only the first instance to showup.
http://baka.updates.com/lang/en/test/cbct-basics/...
The acronym is CBCT
I tried initial, abbreviation, acronym with English set to true but didn't work. I am using WP 2.6.3
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[...] Ubernyms WP Plugin: the ultimate text-replacement plugin ‘configure a set of frequently used abbreviations that will be automatically encoded nicely whenever you use them. The goal is to make them visible in a way that is literate for both humans and computers.’ (tags: wp-plugins wordPress) [...]
[...] 18 mai 2006 · Technologie I use the now defunct Acronym Replacer by Joel Bennett of Huddled Masses. Since I do not need any text replacement apart for acronyms, the incentive to move forward to Ubernyms is quite low as far as I am concerned. [...]
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[...] Ubernyms(link). Ok, I discovered this today via Needle Exchange but I’m going to slowly be adding to it and cleaning it up, defining both the knitting and jewish words I use that part of my readers will grok but the other half may not. If there’s a word or combination of letters you don’t understand, please let me know. [...]
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[...] Per gli utenti Wordpress esiste un magnifico plugin chiamato Ubernyms che semplifica di molto le cose in quanto aggiunge al nostro pannello di amministrazione una schermata di configurazione in cui potremo decidere quali tipi di attributi usare ed A? giA configurato con una buona lista di acronimi molto usati nella rete, eviteremo cosA? di dover inserire manualmente i tag HTML/XHTML ogni volta che dobbiamo scrivere un acronimo . [...]
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