John August

Scrippets

Let’s make a Fountain block for WordPress

Geek Alert, Projects, Scrippets, Software

Way back in 2008, I announced a plugin for WordPress that made it easy to insert short bits of screenplay-like material into a blog post.

EXT. HOUSE -- DAY

Max is checking his mail when he spots neighbor FRANK crossing the street, heading his way.

Shaking his head...

MAX

I thought we talked about this, Frank.

FRANK

(drunk)

I was born naked and I’m not changing now.

I called these chunks “scrippets.” This plain-text format ultimately became Fountain, which in turn became the basis of Highland and other screenwriting apps.1

The Scrippets plugin still works — you can install it today — but WordPress has moved on to the concept of “blocks.” These are discrete elements of a post that can do specific things. You can find blocks for code syntax, tables, and even poetry verse.

There should be one for Fountain.

If you’re a WordPress coder who’d like to tackle this project, here are some thoughts to get you started.

  1. Visit Fountain.io/developer and the GitHub for implementations of the parser.
  2. While I’d love to support the whole Fountain spec, I’m not convinced title pages and headers/footers make sense for this use case.
  3. Notes and synopses are super useful. We’ll want to style them so they’re visually distinct.
  4. Forced elements are very important. Blog posts often center on weird edge cases, and international users may need to force character names like @黄.
  5. Ultimately, it’ll be best if there’s one “official” Fountain block plugin, but if multiple people decide to tackle it, my team and I can help coordinate.
  6. This would be presumably be GPL licensed. This is for the good of the internet, not any one company or person.

So if you feel like giving it a shot, go for it! You certainly don’t need our permission.

If you have something you’d like us to see, or a question we can answer, write ask@johnaugust.com

  1. One of the coders who put together the WordPress plugin was Nima Yousefi, who has now coded nearly everything we’ve made. ↩

Answer Finder

Geek Alert, Meta, QandA, Scrippets

I’ve had some version of this site up and running since 2003, when I became frustrated with how difficult it was to search through previous columns I’d written for IMDb. 1

Unlike most blogs,2 many of the 1,000+ posts on this site are still highly relevant today. They’re answers to reader-submitted questions, and most of the questions haven’t changed. It’s often difficult to find these older entries, however, and the chronological blog format doesn’t help. I’ve struggled to find ways to make it easier to dig around.

The category archives at the bottom of (almost) every page are a start. Clicking on Education, for example, will take you to a listing of all the articles in that category, along with brand-new summaries — most of them written by Matt.

Another option is what I’m calling Answer Finder, which takes all the screenwriting-related entries and groups them together in a much more browsable interface. It’s an experiment, and your feedback is certainly appreciated. Two caveats:

  • There are known issues with Internet Explorer. In particular, the category box appears too far down the page. It’s a problem with IE’s box model, and if someone wants to grab the CSS and fix it, knock yourself out.

  • Some of the older entries have weird formatting, particularly with scrippets, because the specs have changed over the years. One by one, we’ll be going through old posts and fixing them. But if you see something wonky, feel free to note the URL in the comments to this post.

geek alertFor the truly curious, here’s how Answer Finder works. (You’re welcome to look at the source, of course.)

  1. Getting both categories and posts out of WordPress is more difficult than you’d think, which is why I’m happy to have found the plugin WP Categories and Posts.

  2. I hacked the plugin to make it generate DIVs for each category.3

  3. With a custom page template (an under-appreciated WordPress feature), I used jQuery to hide the DIVs, bind the category menu and place a session cookie to help you come back to the same place when navigating away.4

Let me know how the new page is working, or not working, over the next week. You may see periodic downtime or wonkiness while things get sorted out.

  1. Remarkably, they’re still running these, even though it’s been years since I’ve written a new one. ↩
  2. I’m using “blog” in the 2009 sense of a series of short posts arranged chronologically, newest first. That is: a blog is a blog because of the way it’s formatted, not because of the content per se. It’s easy to forget that the term blog originally referred to weblogs, or online personal journals. ↩
  3. When I say “hack,” I really mean it. It works because it works, not because I really understand it. PHP makes baby Jesus cry. ↩
  4. jQuery, by the way, is awesome. It lets a barely-programmer like me leverage a lot of CSS knowledge. And I have new respect for JavaScript, which is more Pythonic than I was anticipating. Given the speed boosts in the new Safari and Google Chrome, I’m looking forward to seeing what ambitious ideas will be coming down the pipe in 2009. ↩

Scrippets for Habari

Scrippets

Augusto Pascutti writes in with news of a new Scrippets plug-in, this time for the Habari blogging platform.

You can check out Augusto’s plugin here.

I hadn’t heard of Habari either, but it’s PHP-based like WordPress, and looks like it’s trying to incorporate several newer features of the language.

As always, if you’re a coder who feels like bringing Scrippets to your favorite platform, please consider this an invitation. Currently, we’re available for WordPress, bbPress, vBulletin, Drupal and Blogger, with less-elegant solutions for Movable Type, TypePad, WP.com and Tumblr.

Scrippets for vBulletin

Scrippets

The unstoppable Nima has a put together a Scrippets plug-in (sorry, “product”) for the very popular vBulletin forum system. It’s free, and you can find it here. Many thanks to Craig Mazin for his help in the process.

If you’d like to start using scrippets on your favorite messageboard, check the footer to see if it’s vBulletin, then send the link to your friendly moderator. It’s very straightforward to add.

“Traditional” scrippets, with the [scrippet][/scrippet] markup, are now available for the following systems:

In addition, you can use the interactive Scrippets Maker to generate markup for other systems that allow you to modify the CSS, including…

  • Movable Type
  • TypePad
  • WordPress.com
  • Tumblr
  • and many others

For general instructions on how to get the Scrippet Maker version working on these semi-supported systems, click here.

A real Movable Type/TypePad plugin should be very straightforward, so if there are any developers interested in creating one, please check out the code.