Better Pull Quotes with MooTools

By  on  

Pull Quotes

Chris Coyier authored a post titled Better Pull Quotes: Don't Repeat Markup a while back. In his post he created great-looking pull quotes without repeating any content -- instead he uses jQuery to dynamically create the pull quotes. The following is the MooTools method for doing so.

The HTML

<p><span class="pull-me">As a MooTools "insider", however, I'm excited for what the MooTools team will bring to the table during 2010.</span> We'll be launching the Forge (our public plugin repository), releasing MooTools 2, continuing to grow MooTools More, featuring more community work, and much more. MooTools FTW!</p>

The HTML above features a paragraph of content with a SPAN tag wrapping what I'd like to be the pull quote.

The CSS

.quote { padding:20px; margin:0 0 20px 20px; font-size:20px; font-style:italic; background:#eee; color:#999; display:block; width:200px; float:right; }

You may style the quote any way you'd like. These elements are traditionally large in text with italicized text and a different background color.

The MooTools JavaScript

window.addEvent('domready',function() {
	//grab all quotes
	$$('span.pull-me').each(function(span) {
		//inject styled quote into page
		new Element('span',{
			'class': 'quote',
			text: span.get('text')
		}).inject(span.getParent(),'top');
	});
});

We find each element with a "pull-me" CSS class and generate a new element with our "quote" class. We then inject the new element into the original element's parent. That's all!

Chris did a great job with the execution of his idea. This is a technique that will likely be used well into the future.

Recent Features

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Image Reflections with CSS

    Image reflection is a great way to subtly spice up an image.  The first method of creating these reflections was baking them right into the images themselves.  Within the past few years, we've introduced JavaScript strategies and CANVAS alternatives to achieve image reflections without...

  • By
    Xbox Live Gamer API

    My sharpshooter status aside, I've always been surprised upset that Microsoft has never provided an API for the vast amount of information about users, the games they play, and statistics within the games. Namely, I'd like to publicly shame every n00b I've baptized with my...

Discussion

  1. Love it! Simple and tidy. The syntax looks a lot cleaner that the jQuery equivelent too.

    Mootools FTW!

  2. Dutchie

    This is a nice technique (btw, my comments textarea grows onkeypress? hehe, this input is already huge…) but sometimes (most times?) search engine wise it is smarter to put the pull quotes a second time in a page, a change to the content perhaps (applying a title, or summarizing 2 sentences into 1) instead of auto generating this with JS.
    But- it’s a nice idea and easy to implement.

  3. Not a bad technique. I may try it in some project someday…

    But I find one thing “unpleasant”: you have to take existing text in order to make it a quote… Hmm… Well, a quote IS a quote from a text, so sure, that makes sense! :D

    What I meant is that, in some case, you want an excerpt, or some kind of a resumé in one sentence, that wouldn’t be part of the whole text… I guess that I’d edit the script and add a “class:=’pull-me-hidden'” in order to make something like that work…

    Just my two cents…

  4. Simply a great way to quote a specific portion of your text without Google or any other search engine indexing it twice!

  5. Duarte Nunes

    Simple and brilliant!
    thanks David.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!