Abivia Web Development and Hosting

Abivia's Redaction Utility is a simple yet powerful plugin that lets you remove unwanted output from your pages. Download here.

Phoca Gallery 2.6.1 users: Version 2.6.1 will edit your redact settings to preserve it's links! Talk about being not clear on the GPL! Never fear, the fix is easy. Please see this forum post for ways to get around their hidden actions.

NEW:

See examples for specific extensions at the bottom of this article.

Does your favourite extension insist on putting a back link in it's output? Our redaction plugin is exactly what you need. Now you can eliminate unwanted code without hacking the offending extension.

The Redact plugin is designed to remove unwanted signatures that other extensions or templates display in their output. The GPL explicitly allows you to modify code, despite many extensions that attempt to apply additional restrictions above and beyond the GPL. While is it possible to modify the code to remove these signatures, this customization complicates the process of applying updates from the extension developer. Abivia's plg_redact lets you remove these unwanted notices without changing the code.

Here's how it works: say you have an extension that insists on putting a back link to the developer's site in its output. For example, an extension might generate this code:

Powered by Not Quite Clear on the GPL.

All you have to do is install Abivia's plg_redact, then set up a rule like this:

div a,/nqcogpl\.com/i

Then plg_redact finds all occurrences of "nqcogpl.com" that are enclosed by "div" and "a" tags, and removes them. It's that simple. The plugin also recognizes class and ID tags using a CSS-like syntax, so if you only want to eliminate the link in divs with class "credits", you can write:

div.credits a,/nqcogpl\.com/i

and links not enclosed by a div with the class "credits" will be untouched. The extension also recognizes "*", "?", and "+" as wild card elements, so this:

*.credits a,/nqcogpl\.com/i 

Will remove any element with class="credits" that contains the link you want to remove.

Version 1.0.6 fixes an error with self-closed tags (like img) in the redacted string.

Sample Rules