John D Wells

Yesterday I was working with the amazing FieldFrame plugin for ExpressionEngine. I was putting together a Matrix fieldtype, made up of 4 columns: status, title, description, and thumbnail. After everything was all hooked up, I gave it a test run and then realised that the description field was not being parsed and formatted by the EE engine. In particular, EE was not automatically wrapping paragraph tags around my multiple lines of text.

In Wordpress, there’s a quick function wpautop() that performs that particular formatting hurdle. Or you can envoke the filter for “the_content”, like so:

$my_textarea = apply_filters('the_content', $my_textarea);
echo $my_textarea;

But for EE? After a quick Google I found the answer: a clever plugin EE Typography, which not only formats the text, but exposes all of the formatting options available within the admin panel (XHTML, Auto br, etc). Use it simply like so:

{exp:ee_typography}
Text you want processed
{/exp:ee_typography}

The community saves the day once again.

My RSS Reader isn’t exactly the productivity saviour that it likely is for most. I visit it irregularly, and generally fill it with things that have nothing to do with my profession. In fact it’s mostly filled with bike-related readings. So for all of you fellow cyclist fans, here’s my list (links to actual blogs/forums instead of feeds):

1. 14bikeco’s Blog
2. Copenhagen Cycle Chic
3. Copenhaganize.com - The Copenhagen Bike Culture Blog
4. Fixed Gear London’s Weblog
5. London Bike Polo
6. London Cycle Chic
7. London FG/SS Events (links to Google Calendar feed)
8. London Fixed-gear and Single-speed
9. London Singlespeed Society
10. Magnificent Revolution
11. Urban Cycle Chic
12. Velorution

But I’m sure I’m missing a lot of good cycle porn; what do you follow?

Testing Posty. That is all.