This is a long shot - but does anyone have a snippet of how to make the firast word of a returned $content bold.

Hope this makes sense.

It depends on the HTML content of your $Content field, but you should achieve it quite easily with a combination of CSS pseudo-elements :first-child and :first-letter.

Hope it helps,
Juan

EDIT: Sorry, this approach is useless, I read too fast… I thought you were talking about the first letter, not the first word.

It is a shame there is no :first-word. Thanks for response though. I will remember this if I need to highlight first letter :)

Its a bit over the top, but you could use javascript/jquery. I am pulling this out of ass a bit, but I imiagine it would be something like:

// Assuming your content container div has  a class of Layout and
// your first element within that is a p tag. This returns the first para
// as an array split by a space character.
textString = $('div.Layout p:first').text().split(' ');

// Now get the first word from that array and add strong tags
firstWord = '<strong>' + textString.slice(0,1) + '</strong>';

// Create variable for reassembled para
reassemble = '';

// Loop through each item in the array, and add you bold word in place of the first item. 
for (i = 0; i < textString.length; i++) {
    if(i == 0)
        reassemble += firstWord + ' ';
    else
        reassemble += textString + ' ';
}

$('div.Layout p:first').text(reassemble);

I am sure there is a more efficient way of doing this (probably involving a regex), but its far to late for that :).

Thanks Mo. i will try this and let you know :)

I found out a regex function that will work for Pages. Thanks to UC @ www.silverstripe.org/archive/show/4383

New Field on Class "Page" in page.php

Get the first word

	function NewField_FirstWord(){
			list($Field_Split) = explode(' ', $this->NewField); //Found on the PHP Manual Website
			return $Field_Split;
	}

	function NewField_AllButFirstWord(){
		list($Field_Split) = explode(' ', $this->NewField);  
		return preg_replace("/$Field_Split/", '', $this->NewField, 1); //Preg includes a count at the end, for PHP 5.0+
	}

Your NewField can be Content, Title, or whatever new field.

Page.ss

just call

<span>$NewField_FirstWord</span>$NewField_AllButFirstWord

If $Content is a HTMLText, you should consider strip_tags before.

function Content() {
	$content = $this->Content;
	$content_plain = trim(strip_tags($content));
	$content_1st = current(explode(" ",$content_plain));
	$content = preg_replace("/$content_1st/", "<strong>$content_1st</strong>", $content, 1);
	return $content;
}

Here is another way to get first word, second word, etc:

 
public function MenuTitleFirstWord() {
	if ( str_word_count($this->MenuTitle) == 0 ) {
	    return null;
	} else {
	    return str_word_count($this->MenuTitle,1)[0]; 
	}
}

public function MenuTitleSecondWord() {
	if ( str_word_count($this->MenuTitle) <= 1 ) {
	    return null;
	} else {
	    return str_word_count($this->MenuTitle,1)[1]; 
	}
}

LimitWordCount for StringField may also be useful: http://api.silverstripe.org/3.2/source-class-StringField.html#_LimitWordCount