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Though net bookings declined for mobile titles year-over-year, EA says that fall was offset by a strong debut from FIFA Mobile. ...

Ah, gay Paris. What a wonderful city. The city of lights. Romance, art, architecture. It’s all there. And you can go there in Nocturne in the City of Lights, a new adventure for Space 1889 from Modiphius (hey, just because you can go into space doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to do on the Earth, […]

The Chinese internet tech company NetEase has made a $50 million investment in SpatialOS dev Improbable, picking up what a press release describes as a "small stake" in the company in the process. ...

As I’m sure you know by now, Gen Con is right around the corner. Every company out there is putting up a preview of what they’ll be showing off at their booths, and Pandasaurus is no different. Want to check out The Mind that everyone’s talking about? How about Dinosaur Island? They’ll have those and […]

The folks over at Battlefront are taking a whole bunch of new pre-orders for Flames of War. They’ve got the Enemy at the Gates and Iron Cross products over on their website, and if you want to get them as soon as they’re available, being the first gamer on your block with them, you’ll want […]

Smart Trim your Content and Modify Teasers Raman Fri, 07/27/2018 - 20:56

Teasers provide a brief summary or a short description of an article (or any other content). They give a visitor an insight and a quick overview of the content. Hence, it becomes crucial for a teaser to be eye-catchy in order to get that one click from the reader. It should leave them with a sense of curiosity and intrusiveness.

Drupal, out of the box, provides a teaser view mode and three formats for the text fields – Default, Summary or Trimmed and Trimmed. However, the trimming feature is very limited and allows only the number of characters to be configured.

Trimming options for text fields out of the box

We can use a contributed module, Smart Trim to take this trimming functionality to another level. Let us have a look at it.

Downloading and Installing Smart Trim

The module has dependencies on a few core modules including Field, Filter, User, System, and Text. Once you have made sure these are enabled, you can download and install it using any of the below methods.

$ drush dl smart_trim && drush en smart_trim -y

or

$ drupal module:download smart_trim && drupal module:install smart_trim

or

$ composer require 'drupal/smart_trim:^1.1'

After downloading the module using composer, enable it from the admin UI available at admin/modules.

Enabling Smart Trim module using admin UIModifying Teasers of Content using Smart Trim

The module declares a new field format, Smart trimmed, with a set of configurable options. To modify the teasers of your content, follow the below steps.

1. Navigate to Manage → Structure → Content types → {your-content-type} and select the Manage Display tab.
    
2. Next, select the view mode from the sub-tabs. You may do it for any of your view modes, but for now, let us do it for the teaser view mode.
    
3. Change the field format of the required field to “Smart trimmed” to take advantage of the module. You can do this for any of the text fieldsSelecting Smart trimmed text format
4. Click on the gear icon to bring down the configuration options for the format. Here, as you can see, we get a lot more options than the standard trimmed format.Configuring the format settings
5. You can now configure the following settings as per your preference
    

   Configuration

   Default Value

   Description

   Trim Length

   600

   The number of units of text in the Smart Trim mode (including HTML markup)

   Trim Type

   Characters

   Use characters or words to count the trim length

   Trim Suffix

   -

   Suffix characters at the point of Trimming

   Wrap Output

   False

   Add a tag to wrap the trimmed content

   Wrap Class

   Trimmed

   CSS class of the wrapper tag

   More Link

   False

   Show a more link

   More Class

   More-link

   CSS class of more link

   More Text

   More

   Text for more link

   Summary

   Use summary if present, and do not trim

   Use a provided summary or the trimmed content

   Strip HTML

   False

   Strip off the HTML added in the WYSIWYG for the trimmed content

   Honor a zero trim length

   False

   Allow a trim length of zero units

6. Click on “Update”, followed by the “Save” button to save the changes

Now, go back to your view or the page where the configured view mode is being used. You will observe that the changes have been successfully applied.

Teaser of an article with Smart trimmed field format

Looking at the source code of the page, we can see that the wrapper tag has been added with the configured CSS classes. You can now also add custom CSS for these classes in your Drupal theme.

Observe the CSS classes applied to the div tag and more linkSumming Up

The Smart Trim module blends smoothly and proves to be one of the must-have modules or your Drupal site. Its easy configuration allows site builders to quickly add a new field format and harness the full power of the teaser view mode.

In case of any query or suggestion, don’t forget to leave a comment down below.

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Provides an Aliyun/Alibaba Cloud OSS plugin for Flysystem.

Dependencies

composer require aliyuncs/oss-sdk-php:2.3.0 -vvv

Configuration

Example configuration:

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Less than a week away. Gen Con is less than a week away. This weekend’s the last one before the show. Still tons of planning and prep to do. For you, that includes figuring out what booths you want to visit. Well, to help out, IDW Games has posted up what sort of things they […]

On the heels of Microsoft acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion, Google has partnered with Microsoft to provide a continuous integration and delivery platform for GitHub. While I predicted Microsoft would integrate build tools into GitHub, I didn't expect them to integrate with Google's as well. Google and GitHub probably partnered on this before the Microsoft acquisition, but I'm pleasantly surprised that Microsoft has decided to offer more than Azure-based solutions. It sends a strong message to anyone who was worried about Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, and should help put worries about GitHub's independence to rest. Satya Nadella clearly understands and values the Open Source movement and continues to impress me. What an interesting time to be a developer and to observe the cloud wars!

It’s coming up to the end of the month. July will soon be gone. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no time left for July releases. In fact, Corvus Belli has just posted up their July releases for Infinity. Go on and check them out. From the post: July releases now available at our online […]

Summer. It’s that time of the year, where publishers launch new games during the major gaming conventions. With all sorts of new games hitting the market, we gobble them up, anxious to get them to the table. The problem is we already have a game we are playing. And so comes the age-old conundrum of how to finish up one game and start a new one gracefully. How can we have both a satisfying end and an exciting beginning? Because seriously, I just got this game and its burning in my hands — I need to run it nooooowwwww.

The Shiny

Yea. The shiny gets all of us. We recently talked about it here on the Stew and on the Gnomecast. It’s tough to resist. For me, right now, I am running this amazing Tales from the Loop game, but I got my PDF copy of Scum & Villainy. I really want to play S&V. I loved Blades in the Dark so much, that doing it in space can only be better…like really better. At the same time, my Loop game is all sorts of amazing, and building up to a big reveal. Ok, so how do we do this?

It’s More Work For The GM

Welp, here is the honest fact. If you want to transition between games well, you are going to have to do some extra work. If you are up for it, it will totally be worth it, but make sure you have the time to commit.

In a nutshell, you will need to bring your game to a satisfying conclusion, while at the same time prepping your new campaign. While this seems pretty easy, you are going to have to keep focus and remain committed to the campaign that is ending, while you crack open the new shiny and bask in its lovely glow. You are going to have to resist the urge to dump everything and fall into that siren’s song of the new game.

Why Bother?

Too many campaigns end without satisfying endings. They just one day stop. And we as humans are creatures that are conditioned to stories. Deep in our animal brains, we like things that have a start, middle, and an ending. It is why we lost our shit when Firefly was canceled. The same is true for campaigns. They are so much more satisfying when they end cleanly.

Bringing The Old To An End

So the first thing we need to do is plan the end of our campaign. Finishing a campaign with the end of a meaningful story or arc is a good way to wrap things up. Look at your current storyline and the arc you are in and look for how that will logically complete. Also, consider if you also need to conclude any minor arcs, character arcs, etc in order to give the campaign a sense of completion.

Next, with some understanding of how the campaign could end, go and talk to your players. You need to get their consent for this. In many cases, they are just as excited for the new shiny as well, so you won’t have to sell them too hard, but depending on the game it could be harder than you plan. As you are telling them about wanting to run the new game in the future, you can also give them an idea of where the campaign will end, and likely when based on how many sessions you think it will take to get there. Talk it through, ask if they have any arcs they would like to see completed before the game wraps, and if possible, make sure they are included.

BTW – it’s not that you need all the players’ consent to switch games – after all, you are the one who is running the game – but it is polite to ask everyone for the input, especially if this is the group that you are planning to run the shiny game with.

If everyone is on board with the plan to end the game, then make the commitment to do so and work towards that goal. Often there is an energy to the game when everyone knows that a major arc is going to conclude, and this can add some new excitement to the game.

Prepping the New Game

Now that you know when and how your old game is going to end, you can start your work of getting the new game prepped. The first thing you likely have to do is to start reading the rules, so get cracking. As you get into the rules, you are going to start to have ideas for the campaign you want to run. Start jotting those ideas down. Eventually, you will need to get some player input and that is where it gets tricky.

We Suck At Finishing Things  …we humans love starting things and we hate finishing them.

So everything we have been talking about up to this point is really straightforward advice… finish one thing before starting another. But from experience as a GM and as a Project Manager let me tell you that we humans love starting things and we hate finishing them. Rarely does a Project Manager have issues getting a new team started on something, but rarely does that team surge across the finish line with the same excitement.

The same is true about GMs and players. All of your instincts are going to drive you towards dumping that campaign and playing the new shiny next session. First, there are going to be the doubts that creep into your mind… why do you need to finish the campaign, it was fun enough. Then the new ideas from the shiny are going to jump into your mind… oh man, I can’t wait to do this and that in the new game, it’s going to be so awesome. Third, it will all get worse when your players get excited as you ask them questions or tell them about the game, and they start having that feeling of doubt about the old and excitement of the new.

This is where you need to dig in and hold the line. If you are going to do this right and give your campaign the ending it deserves, you are going to need to fight your own inner voices, and you are going to have to keep the group focused on finishing.

Here are a few tips:

• Share info with them as late as possible. The less excited they get the more energy you can use on keeping yourself focused.
• Have a target date in mind. It helps to know that there is an ending and it’s getting closer. When we don’t know when things will end we lose hope of getting there.
• Get it out of your head. The reason we obsess over things is because your brain does not trust you to remember them. For example, why can’t you remember you need a light bulb when you are in the store, but you do two seconds before you turn on the light with the burnt light bulb. So when you have some great campaign idea, write it down into something you can look at later. Get it out of your head, and your brain will calm down.
• When you do involve the rest of the players, remind them of the goal of closing out the campaign and when that it is. Set expectations.

Be Ready To Start After You Finish

So if you have held it together, you have been prepping all your stuff for the new game while bringing the old one to a conclusion. Pay that off to the players by being ready to jump into the new game the session after the old one concludes. Finish the rules, start working on campaign ideas, and get materials ready for your session zero. Be ready to start right after you close out the current campaign.

On that note, take a little time after you close the old campaign to reflect with your group on the fun you had. In fact, a little ending ritual or party never hurts.

It Is All About Self-Control

Our human nature to chase the greener grass can mean that we play the newest and shiniest games, but we sometimes leave incomplete campaigns in our wake. With a little awareness, planning, and a bunch of self-control, we can transition between games and end a successful campaign before starting a fresh new one.

Right now, I am reading S&V while planning out the last 3-4 sessions of my Loop game. I am pretty calm and committed to bringing the Loop to its season finale. I will let you know how it goes.

How are you at this? Do you drop campaigns for the new shiny, or can you get them concluded properly? How tempting are new shiny games to you? How do you do it?

This module allows users to set up Cludo search https://www.cludo.com/ on their website, it sets up search blocks for the form and for the results page.

There is a configuration page where you can add your Cludo Authentication details and the path to your search page.

Placeholder for a visualization library agnostic field formatter for OpenAPI files.

Until it will be released please use the Swagger Field Formatter.

Initial discussion about this project: https://www.drupal.org/project/swagger_ui_formatter/issues/2984658