How to limit the characters of featured article titles - joomla2.5

Question

I need to have the article title in the homepage (featured articles) only in one line.
So, it is needed that the titles do not exceed 26 characters. The remaining characters would be stripped out and replaced by ...
How can I do that?

Answer 1

FooThis is something that is achieved with a plugin. The following should do the job - pls. zip these files and install using extension mgr.
foo.xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<extension type="plugin" version="1.6" method="upgrade" group="content">
<name>Content - foo</name>
<creationDate>2013-05-30</creationDate>
<version>1.0</version>
<releaseDate>2013-06-07 07:08:00</releaseDate>
<releaseType>First public release!</releaseType>
<author>Michael Baas</author>
<authorEmail>mb#mbaas.de</authorEmail>
<authorUrl>mbaas.de</authorUrl>
<copyright>(c) 2013 Michael Baas</copyright>
<description>Limit length of featured article-titles - demo</description>
<files>
<filename plugin="foo">foo.php</filename>
</files>
</extension>
foo.php
<?php
class plgContentFoo extends JPlugin
{
public function onContentPrepare($context,$article,$params,$limitstart)
{
$view = JRequest::getCmd( 'view');
// echo "view=$view";
$fp = $in_array($view,array("Frontpagecategory","addmore"));
if ($fp && 26<strlen($article->title)) {
$article->title = trim(substr($article->title,0,23)) . "...";
return true;
}
}
}
?>
If it does not work for you, it might be that you have a different view on your frontpage. In that case pls. remove the comments from "// echo "view=$view";" and replace "addmore" in the following line with the result that is shown when you view the frontpage. (But careful: "Frontpagearticle" means you are viewing an individual article from the frontpage, I assume in that case you would not want the trimming...)
Also the "common" method of detecting whether or not the user is viewing the frontpage is described here: http://docs.joomla.org/How_to_determine_if_the_user_is_viewing_the_front_page BUT the problem with the approach is that also viewing a single article that was featured on fp would cause these statements to return "TRUE" which I think is wrong, because the users is not viewing the frontpage then...
Yet, having said that, it could be that my code might also fail in a few cases and would need to be combined with the method from the article I linked to (checking the menu)...

Answer 2

Just substring to ensure sufficient length. I don't know Joomla but the C# equivalent would be:
private string FormatForTitle(string input)
{
if (input.Length <= 26)
{
return input;
}
// Trim
return input.Substring(0, 23) + "...";
}
Should not be hard to port to PHP.

Answer 3

<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
$(".PopularPosts .post-title a").each(function(){
if($(this).text().length>10)
{$(this).text($(this).text().substr(0, 10)+'...');}
});
//]]>
</script>