Joomla content plugin
Meet Chaos Filet.
Cut the good parts out of any article. Serve them anywhere.
Chaos Filet lifts fields out of one article and drops them into another, or into a Custom HTML module, with one short tag. A title here, a photo and a tidy excerpt there, a custom field tucked into the middle of a sentence. Change the source article and every slice changes with it.
Today's catch, served live by the plugin: Penguin Detectives, Kraken Gardening and Phoenix Weather.
Why it exists
Copy and paste goes stale.
The same opening hours on five pages. The same bio under three articles. The same feature blurb on the home page, the product page and a module in the sidebar. You update one, forget the others, and now your site disagrees with itself.
Chaos Filet keeps one source and serves slices of it everywhere. Write it once in an ordinary article, and every page that borrows from it shows the new version on the next load. No duplicate content to hunt down, and no module to build for every little snippet.
Live, on this page
The tasting menu.
Everything in a white box below is real: Chaos Filet is running on this page, pulling from ten sample articles. The tags in the dark boxes are real too. They didn't turn into articles because Chaos Filet leaves anything inside a code block alone.
A single slice
Right in the middle of a sentence
The ! drops the wrapper, so the title sits inside the paragraph instead of breaking it in two.
<p>Breaking: the {article 12:title!}
have cracked another case.</p>Breaking: the Penguin Detectives have cracked another case.
The byline
Link, author and date, all inline
Mix as many slices into one line as you like. The date follows the format set in the plugin.
{article 14:link!} was filed by
{article 14:author!} on {article 14:date!}.Moose Ballet was filed by Troy Fish on 09 October 2026.
The teaser
Pick the fields, in your order
Each field arrives in its own div with a class named after it, all inside one wrapper, ready for your template to style. The read-more link tells screen readers which article it opens.
{article 16:image,title,excerpt,readmore}
The platter
Ready-made cards
The |card layout ships with the plugin: photo, linked title, date and author, excerpt and read more, in a Bootstrap card. Copy it into your template to make it your own.
{article 8|card} {article 9|card} {article 11|card}
Otter Parliament
02 October 2026 · Troy Fish
Everyone knows otters hold paws while they sleep, but few realize they allegedly hold parliamentary sessions at dawn. According to highly unreliable marshland rumors, senior otters wear kelp neckties and debate whether river rocks should be sorted by shininess. These…
Read more: Otter Parliament
Dragon Chickens
09 October 2026 · Troy Fish
In a remote valley that absolutely does not exist, chickens occasionally hatch from dragon eggs. While incapable of breathing fire, they can allegedly toast marshmallows with aggressive sneezing. Farmers have learned to keep graham crackers on hand during nesting season.…
Read more: Dragon Chickens
Unicorn Insurance
22 October 2025 · Troy Fish
Unicorns are allegedly required to carry comprehensive horn insurance before entering enchanted forests. This policy covers accidental rainbow discharge, spontaneous glitter storms, and collisions with overly enthusiastic bards. Rates increase dramatically during festival season. Claims adjusters report that most incidents…
Read more: Unicorn InsuranceBy alias
Names that survive the move
Article IDs can change between a staging site and the live one. Aliases usually don't. If two categories share an alias, add the category: sample-articles/kraken-gardening.
This week's tip comes from
{article kraken-gardening:link!}.This week's tip comes from Kraken Gardening.
Custom fields
Rendered, or straight from the jar
field: shows a custom field the way Joomla normally displays it. fieldraw: gives the stored value, safe to drop into an attribute. Here it sets the colour of the stripe.
<div style="border-left:.5rem solid
{article 13:fieldraw:accent-colour!}">
{article 13:title!} reported by
{article 13:field:field-reporter!}.
Danger level:
{article 13:field:danger-level!}
</div>Goblin Goldfish reported by Agent Bubbles. Danger level: Spicy
Members only
It knows who's at the table
The Caffeinated Sloths article is for registered members. Chaos Filet checks the article's access level, publish state and dates, and its category's too, for every visitor.
{article 10:title,excerpt}Logged in? The sloths are below. Not logged in? There's nothing here, which is exactly what the public sees. Editors get a small badge explaining why.
The whole fish
Not sure what's in there?
all serves every field, each with a label, even the empty ones. It's a debugging tool, so it repeats itself on purpose.
{article 13:all}Open the full Goblin Goldfish dump
Goblin goldfish inhabit decorative ponds near abandoned castles and possess an unhealthy obsession with treasure. They spend entire afternoons collecting shiny bottle caps and declaring themselves monarchs. Most reigns last roughly fifteen minutes.
Their royal courts consist mainly of frogs pretending to care. Every spring, the goldfish host extravagant underwater coronations attended by exactly three snails. Historians agree the hats are spectacular.
Goblin goldfish carefully track noble bloodlines, most of which were invented moments before being announced. Family trees regularly loop back on themselves, include several ducks, and occasionally list decorative statues as former rulers.
The annual Royal Float Parade attracts visitors from neighboring ponds. The event usually concludes when somebody mistakes a floating leaf for a rival kingdom and declares war.
Goblin goldfish inhabit decorative ponds near abandoned castles and possess an unhealthy obsession with treasure. They spend entire afternoons collecting shiny bottle caps and declaring themselves monarchs. Most reigns last roughly fifteen minutes.
Their royal courts consist mainly of frogs pretending to care. Every spring, the goldfish host extravagant underwater coronations attended by exactly three snails. Historians agree the hats are spectacular.
Goblin goldfish carefully track noble bloodlines, most of which were invented moments before being announced. Family trees regularly loop back on themselves, include several ducks, and occasionally list decorative statues as former rulers.
The annual Royal Float Parade attracts visitors from neighboring ponds. The event usually concludes when somebody mistakes a floating leaf for a rival kingdom and declares war.
What's in the box
Every cut, one tag.
Any field
The whole menu
Title, intro, full text, excerpt, both images, dates, author, category, tags, hits, links and read-more. Or a shortcut that serves a sensible set.
Inline or block
One mark makes it fit
Add ! to a field and it drops its wrapper, so it sits inside a sentence, a heading or an href.
By ID or alias
Moves house with you
Point at an article by its ID, its alias, or category and alias. Staging to live without rewriting a single tag.
Layouts
Plate it your way
A Bootstrap card layout ships ready to use. Add your own in your template, the same way as any Joomla override.
Custom fields
Your own ingredients
Any article custom field, rendered as Joomla shows it or as its stored value for attributes and styles.
Plays by the rules
No sneaking into the kitchen
Unpublished, scheduled or restricted articles stay hidden from people who shouldn't see them, and Smart Search never indexes them through a tag.
Editor button
No syntax to memorise
Search for an article, tick the fields, see the tag, insert. Works in the administrator and in front-end editing.
Honest badges
Tells editors what went wrong
A missing article, a typo in a field name or a hidden source gets a small note for editors. The public just sees nothing.
The companion
The fishmonger's button.
Chaos Filet – Insert Tag adds a button under your editor. Click it and a dialog opens with your most recent articles. Search by title, alias or ID, pick one, and tick the fields in the order you want them. Custom fields are listed too.
Choose ID or alias, inline or block, and a layout. The tag builds itself at the bottom as you go, and Insert drops it where your cursor was. It's a separate download, so sites that prefer typing tags never load it.
Download the buttonWhere it earns its keep
Anywhere you'd copy and paste.
Shared snippets
Hours, contact details and disclaimers, kept in one article and shown everywhere.
Teasers & cards
Hand-pick the articles for a home page or a sidebar, in exactly the order you want.
Custom HTML modules
Turn on Prepare Content and any module can borrow from your articles.
Docs & demos
Show tag syntax in code blocks without it running, like this page does.
For the technical crowd
Under the hood.
- Works with
- Joomla 5 and Joomla 6, any template. Articles in any com_content view, and Custom HTML modules with Prepare Content on.
- Weight
- Nothing on the front end. No JavaScript, no stylesheet: the output is plain HTML that your template styles.
- Syntax
{article REF:field,field|layout}, where REF is an ID, an alias, or category/alias. Leave out the fields and you get the body.- Access
- Checks publish state, publish dates and access level for the article and its category, for every visitor, on every page.
- Speed
- Lookups are cached for the page, so the same article used five times costs one query.
- Safety
- Skips Smart Search indexing, stops tags that would loop back on themselves, and escapes titles and stored values.
- Images
- Width and height from the Media Manager, lazy loading (switchable), and Joomla's image suffix cleaned off.
- Theming
- Plain and namespaced classes on every field, a wrapper per tag, and layouts you override in your template.
Ready to fillet?
Want Chaos Filet on your site? Take it, or let's talk.
Chaos Filet
Changelog.
1.2.0
Stable · October 2026The big menu update, and a new companion: Chaos Filet – Insert Tag 1.0.0, the editor button. Tested against stand-ins for Joomla and a SQLite test database.
- Inline slices: end a field with ! to drop its wrapper.
- A wrapper per tag, so a group of fields can be styled as one. Switch it off to keep the old markup.
- New fields: url, readmore, alias and id, plus fieldraw for stored custom-field values.
- Articles by alias, or by category and alias.
- Layouts, overridable in your template, starting with a Bootstrap card.
- Image clean-up: width, height and lazy loading, without Joomla's image suffix.
- The source article's category now counts for publish state and access.
- Badges for editors when a tag comes up empty, and settings for date format and running other content plugins on pulled text.
- Tags inside code blocks are left alone, and a backslash prints one as plain text.
Earlier releases
1.1.0Before the changelog
- The changelog starts at 1.2.0; no detailed notes were kept for 1.1.0 and earlier.
