An easy mod to create custom break titles for your sNews articles

This is a simple little sNews hack to change the default "read more" link to be whatever text you'd like for the [break] tag. The only real change is we will add a title="" tag within the bracket, and the text inside the title tag will be the text for the "Read more" link.

For example, if you put your break tag in as [break title="Continue reading if you love spinach!"], then the link text will appear as "Continue reading if you love spinach. I prefer broccoli by the way. I've been using this little hack on my site for quite a while.

Step 1) OK, as usual, BACK-UP your snews.php file and work off of a copy. Now find the following line within the articles function;

$short_display = strpos($text, '[break]');

and then simply remove the closing bracket from break, so you end up with this;

$short_display = strpos($text, '[break');

Step 2) Now still within the articles function, find the following line;

file_include(str_replace('[break]', '',$text), $shorten);

Now change this to;

file_include(preg_replace('/\[break(.*)\]/', '',$text), $shorten);

Step 3) Now for the bit that actually outputs the read more text, find;

case ($tag == 'readmore' && strlen($r['text']) > $shorten):
	echo $link.$uri.'/'.$r['asef'].'/">'.l('read_more').'</a> ';
	break;

and change that block to;

case ($tag == 'readmore' && strlen($r['text']) > $shorten):
	if (preg_match("/\[break title=\"(.*)\"\]/i",$r['text'],$matches)) {
		$readmore = $matches[1];
	} else {
		$readmore = l('read_more');
	}
	echo $link.$uri.'/'.$r['asef'].'/">'.$readmore.'</a> ';
	break;

Step 4) Now to fix RSS output, find the function strip, and make the following change;

$search = array('/\[include\](.*?)\[\/include\]/', '/\[func\](.*?)\[\/func\]/', '/\[break(.*?)\]/', '/</', '/>/');

That should be it, you should now have custom break titles like mine. In a later tutorial, I'll explain how to take these out of the infobar and display them inside the article itself.