Ubernyms: the ultimate text-replacement plugin

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:

1. 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?)
2. 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?
3. 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

1. 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.

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