Acronym Manager

Categories: Development Created by Kai Laborenz
Making a Web site accessible can be simple or complex, depending on many factors such as the type of content, the size and complexity of the site, and the development tools and environment. One common problem is to mark abbrevations, acronyms an foreign language terms - this could generate a massive amount of work when done manually on bigger sites.
The Acronymmanager helps developers to mark acronyms, abbreviations and foreign language terms on the whole website.

The Acronymmanager is an backend modul. At present it displays in the module "Web" (maybe we will change that later to "functions" to save space in the web module). The module provides an interface to manage a global list of abbreviations, acronyms and foreign language terms.

Yo can enter terms in three texarea fields. One line contains a term, the meaning of this term (will be rendered as title) and the language, separated by "|" like the following examples:
Abk.|Abkurzung|de
e.g.|for example, latin: exempli gratia|en
WTO|World Trade Organisation|en

The "word" will be found in the text of a page and wrapped by a markup.
Following markups are used:
An abbreviation will be marked as:
<abbr title=meaning lang="language" xml:lang="language">word</abbr>

An acronym will be marked as:
<acronym title=meaning lang="language" xml:lang="language">word</acronym>

A foreign language term will be marked as:
<span title=meaning lang="language" xml:lang="language">word</span>


The language of an abbreviation or an acronym will be shown only if its language is different to the language of the web page.
A foreign language term will only marked at all if its language is different to the language of the web page.

You can use the Acronymmanager module to enter the terms or you can add them as data records in the "list" view of the page the records are stored.

A preview of the current page content is shown below the Acronymmanager input fields.

It is possible to customize the style of the preview and where the records are stored (which is id=0 as default).


Installation and configuration:
The Acronymmanager is quite easy to configure.
Just use the Extension Manager to install and activate the extension.

You include the extension into your typoscript template as a postUserFunction:
postUserFunc = tx_sbakronymmanager_pi1->check

You can decide for each page and every single marker of your project whether you want to use the Akronymmanager.

Example:
marks.CONTENT = TEXT
marks.CONTENT < styles.content.get

## Content Rendering with Akronymmanager
marks.CONTENT.stdWrap {
postUserFunc = tx_sbakronymmanager_pi1->check
}
Known problems:
A known problem is that hyphenated abbreviations, acronyms and foreign words will not be matched because the hyphen is used as a separator for words of the source text.


Future of Acronymmanager:
The next big step is to add a glossary for all the terms and add the possibility to enter technical terms or other terms that should be in the glossary but not marked in the pages. We will add a configuration setting for the replaced html code so that you can change this via typoscript.


Contact us:
We are very interested in all kind of feedback - maybe exept very rude ones... - so Write us at <link>laborenz@sunbeam-berlin.de.

Kai Laborenz & Uwe Kiefer