Acronym Plugin

Acronym is a plugin for Movable Type that adds acronym tags to known acronyms.

This text:

This is a XHTML test

becomes

This is a <acronym title="Extensible HyperText Markup Language">XHTML</acronym> test

which in the web browser is shown like this:

This is a XHTML test

Installation

Just unzip the acronym.zip into the plugins directory of your Movable Type installation.

You might have to change the perl path in mt-acronym.cgi from #!/usr/local/perl/bin/perl -w to #!/usr/bin/perl -w

Now add acronym="1" to the <$MTEntryBody> tag in your templates. Like this:

<$MTEntryBody acronym="1" $>

Rebuild your files!

Styling

I'd recommend the following CSS style to style your <abbr> and <acronym> tags:

ABBR, ACRONYM {border-bottom: 1px dotted #000; cursor: help;}

Limitations

Acronyms in links are not replaced. XHTML in <a href="http://gemal.dk">is XHTML bad?</a> is not replaced.

Acronym vs. Abbreviation

I'm aware that most of the so called acronyms that this module substitues aren't acronyms but in fact abbreviations. But since some browsers dont support the <abbr> tag I decided to stick with the <acronym> tag.

Read more about the war between <abbr> and <acronym> here and here.

Version history

Version 2.0

MT3.x support. Acronym now shows up in the main page of your MT installation under Configure Active Plugins
More acronyms added to acronym.db. Total is now 347

Version 1.0

More acronyms added to acronym.db. Total is now 212

Version 0.7

More HTML tags ignored
Better detection of HTML tags to ignore
Acronyms like HTML! are also supported now
Strict warning fixed
More acronyms added to acronym.db. Total is now 170

Version 0.6

Fixed loading of database (acronym.db) under mod_perl by using MT::ConfigMgr
Easier regexp management in acronym detection
More acronyms added to acronym.db. Total is now 162

Version 0.5

Much faster algoritm
Acronyms in text like AOL/Time/Warner are also supported now
More acronyms added to acronym.db

Version 0.4

Variable name change. No code change
More acronyms added to acronym.db

Version 0.3

removed unused use Data::Dumper
added acronym.txt file
renamed acronym.txt into acronym.db

Version 0.2

skip text inside acronym and abbr tags
allow some more chars to be in front of sustituted acronyms
added even more acronyms to acronyms.txt file