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
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

  • By
    Convert XML to JSON with JavaScript

    If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I've been working on a super top secret mobile application using Appcelerator Titanium.  The experience has been great:  using JavaScript to create easy to write, easy to test, native mobile apps has been fun.  My...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools CountDown Plugin

    There are numerous websites around the internet, RapidShare for example, that make you wait an allotted amount of time before presenting you with your reward. Using MooTools, I've created a CountDown plugin that allows you to easily implement a similar system. The MooTools JavaScript The CountDown class...

  • By
    Spyjax:  Ajax For Evil Using Dojo

    The idea of Spyjax is nothing new. In pasts posts I've covered how you can spy on your user's history with both MooTools and jQuery. Today we'll cover how to check user history using the Dojo Toolkit. The HTML For the sake of this...

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!