Open source (pour over pasta)

I've been making a real effort to tidy up my open source portfolio recently; getting issues closed, code tidied up, unit test suites written and on the fantastic Travis and people happier!

As part of this transition, I've decided to retire Sparkplugs and open source the code. Big changes are happening in my professional and personal life over the next few months and I feel it would be disingenuous to pretend that I could carry on supporting and developing my formerly commercial add-ons. After all, there haven’t been any updates to my add-ons for a while now, and support has been flakey. The honest truth is I lost my passion.

But onto bigger and better things!

Exciting things are going on over at my GitHub page (https://github.com/jamierumbelow). You’ll find my two most popular CodeIgniter libraries, MY_Model and MY_Controller. You'll find a recent experiment with node.js, Postmaster, an SMTP testing server I'm remarkably proud of. 

Also, you'll find the source to Sparkplugs' two commercial add-ons, Taggable and MojoBlog. I’m sure I’ll still be involved and am happy to answer any support questions through the issue trackers on the GitHub repositories.

It's an exciting time to be in open source and I've realised that I enjoy the atmosphere so much more than the pressures of a commercial add-on retailer.

So go on. Check out my GitHub profile :)

New in MojoBlog 2.1 - {excerpt}

I have received an immensely high number of requests from users of my popular MojoBlog add-on to add an {excerpt} variable; to allow users to display a short, configurable excerpt of each blog entry's content.

As of MojoBlog 2.1, released last week, you can now use the {excerpt} tag along with the excerpt_words="" parameter to control and display your entry's excerpts. Here's an example of it in use.

{mojo:blog:entries excerpt_words="20"}
    {entries}
        <h2>{title}</h2>
        <p>{excerpt}</p>
        <p><a href="{url_title_path}">Read More</a></p>
    {/entries}
{/mojo:blog:entries}

The previous will display a list of all entry titles and excerpts (chopping off the content at 20 words), along with a Read More link. As always, do check out the documentation to see what else MojoBlog can do.