How to Add Dropcaps to Your CMS Made Simple Website

Last Updated on Tuesday, 12 June 2012 02:35 Written by Ken Griffith Sunday, 1 July 2012 12:00

In books and published works an oversized “Initial” fancy letter, or “Dropcap” is often used as the first letter of a book or chapter.  This is sometimes found in high quality website designs as well, but is not very common on sites with generated content due to the extra work involved to set it up. Here is a handy way to add dropcaps to your CMS Made Simple website.

I have made a little CMS Made Simple plugin called “Dropcaps” that you can install on your CMSMS site by saving it to the “plugins” folder of your web root.  Once you have done that, it will appear in your “tags” list under Extensions in the admin panel.

This plugin is a SMARTY modifier that parses a blob of text, detects the first block level element (paragraph or div), and then wraps the first letter in two <span> tags with certain classes like this: