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plugin:gil

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gil plugin

Compatible with DokuWiki

No compatibility info given!

plugin Perform and show currency conversions

Last updated on
2009-10-04
Provides
Syntax

The missing download url means that this extension cannot be installed via the Extension Manager. Please see Publishing a Plugin on dokuwiki.org. Recommended are public repository hosts like GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket.

This extension has not been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues.

Tagged with convert, experimental

:!: This plugin is Experimental!

gil is a plugin I've developed for DokuWiki that performs a simple task: allow one to show currency conversions in a wiki page.

For that purpose, conversion data made available by Yahoo Finances (™, (C) and/or whatever) is accessed and used to convert a singular amount of currency in an indicated (“source”) currency to a list of intended (“target”) currencies. The result is shown as a (X)HTML tooltip so that clients can hover over the amount and check the conversions.

The plugin name “gil” is inspired by the homonymous, meta-universal currency used in the games of the Final Fantasy franchise. Yes, you guessed it: I'm a fan. ^_^

:!: This plugin is based off of work from Sridhar Kuppalli, a developer who in his blog shows the audience how to use PHP to access the currency data from the online service and use it for conversion. Credits and original idea therefore go to the man. I've just adapted the idea to work in DokuWiki because I thought the nature and intended use of this software may make a plugin like this useful.

Syntax

Installation and Usage

Install

Link for the Plugin Manager
(always points to the latest version)

If the link doesn't work, check the Demo page which contains links.

Configure

To configure the plugin, just access the configuration manager and modify the following settings so that they suit your needs:

Plugin Parameter Default Value Usage
gil_source USD The source currency from which conversions will be performed.
gil_targets EUR A comma-delimited list of target currencies to which conversions will be performed,
and whose results will appear as the tooltip content. An example value would be:
EUR,GBP,QAR
gil_showsource false Unused. If enabled, the ISO code of the source currency will be shown before the amount
for easier identification.

The variables gil_source and gil_targets use the National Currency Codes defined by ISO 4217 (three-letter currency codes). You can check here for the official catalogue, if you feel like you have the gil money to buy, that is; or you can use the Wikipedia link provided above which contains a listing of National Currency Codes sorted by country.

The plugin comes preconfigured to use USD (US Dollar) to EUR (Euro) conversion.

Syntax

To show currency conversions for a certain amount of national money, just precede it with two dollar signs, with no spacing whatsoever.

$$1500

:!: Optionally, introduce an alternative source unit as follows (take into consideration that this will incur in extra traffic and load overhead):

$$EUR1500

As a result, the text is shown in the form “… XXX$1500 …” with the text “YYY$nnnn” as the tooltip, where XXX is the currency code used as source and YYY the one used as target; nnnn is the result of the conversion from the source 1500 units shown in the example to the target currency. See the picture below for an example.

Details:

  • The plugin syntax takes no parameters.
  • Configuration (now localized) is available via the Configuration Manager.

Demo

:!: Demo site is up.

Note language is Spanish but online translators shall do a good job with it.

An example visualization of the gil plugin with the default configuration
(conversion from US Dollar to Euro)

Other Details

Conversion cost

Remember that each currency combination requires one request to Yahoo Finances. That is, if you have 5 target currencies, five request will need to be performed. If you use the syntax for alternative source (for example, your Wiki is configures to use EUR as a source but you need to convert a particular GBP amount), your source becomes a target and thus six requests will be needed. Even further, if you combine default and alternative sources in one page, the amount of requests grows proportionally to sources × targets where sources is the number of different sources you use. Take this into consideration when using this plugin in a production environment rich in financial information or with limited traffic capabilities.

Remember this plugin is experimental.

Known Issues

What the plugin does is to retrieve currency conversion data live from Yahoo Finances. Because of the nature of the plugin, caching of the page is disabled. Remember that because it means if you put too many conversions in a page or are trying to convert to many different currencies, page loading will be quite slow.

For the moment, no caching whatsoever is implemented for the currency conversion data. Basic caching implemented in 0.3b.

Also for the moment, the plugin takes integer amounts for currency only. Partially solved.

The plugin won't visually show the conversion info in Internet Explorer 6 or earlier (and maybe not in IE7 either) because Internet Explorer does not adequately support <abbr>. However if you check the source code of the page, the conversions are actually there. This is a bug on their part (and intended behaviour on mine). Take the chance to switch to a better browser!

Source Code

Download and unpack from the links above to get a view of the Source Code.

Things to Be Done

The following improvements are planned for the next release:

  • Using the national currency symbol instead of the generic $.
  • Verification of source currency validity 1).
  • …Ability to use another service?

When will the major be released? Whenever it's ready.

Other Developments

Discussion

Leave your :?:'s here and I'll try to prove some :!:'s. — Luis Machuca B. 2009/06/21 00:48

The currency shown in the text needs some CSS formatting, maybe a dotted underline so the web page user moves their mouse over.

It currently doesn't have one because the syntax makes use of the <ABBR> tag by the browser… I'll try and provide a sensible CSS styling for the next release. Much thanks! - — Luis Machuca B. 2009/06/21 23:45

1)
i.e.: things like disallowing decimal units in currencies that do not have fractional units, or disallowing conversions from the testing-purpose-only X?? codes
plugin/gil.1255193329.txt.gz · Last modified: 2009-10-10 18:48 by laynee

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