Early last month I posted two different ways to have random fields in ExpressionEngine stating that “…in ExpressionEngine, a ‘random number’ expression has yet to exist”. Well I hate to say but I was wrong! In fact, ExpressionEngine comes with a “Randomizer” plugin built right in. Simply navigate to: Admin > Utilities > Plugin Manager.

However, there is an inconvenience with the “Randomizer” plugin. It’s a pain to use! 

The instructions state:
-Open this file: /plugins/pi.randomizer.php
-Fill the array with as many quotes as you want.
-Then place the following tag in any of your templates: {exp:randomizer:set_one}

A friendly no thanks to that plugin. So I did a bit of searching and found a plugin (by a different author) called “Randomizer Plus” and its the best solution I’ve found so far to randomization within ExpressionEngine’s template system.

Setting it up is also really easy. Take the pi.randomizer_plus.php file from the downloaded zip archive file, and upload it into your ‘plugins’ directory, located in /system/plugins. 

From there, its just a matter of using the appropriate tag in your page template, and to specify the seperator (delimiter):

{exp:randomizer_plus separator="{OR}"}
Random Value 1
{OR}
Random Value 2
{OR}
Random Value 3
{/exp:randomizer_plus}

Looks clean and super easy to use! It makes you just love ExpressionEngine just that much more.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 8:35 am and is filed under ExpressionEngine, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.