[Pmwiki-users] Group/page descriptions

[Christian Ridderström]

On 18 Aug 2003, John Rankin wrote:

 > We took a slightly different approach to a similar problem. We added 
the markup:
> 
>   [[para:SomeGroup.PageName#anchor]]
> 
 > If #anchor is omitted, it returns the first paragraph of 
 SomeGroup.PageName, after stripping off any initial markup characters 
like *,#,!,:

Ouch... you don't seem to have any line breaks, that's why the quote of 
your message looks so ugly.

Adding the script for this to the cookbook sounds good. But although 
'para' is nice and short, it's a bit non-descriptive. This is about 
'including' parts of another page, 'include' should be in there. What do 
you think of these suggestions?

	[[include-paragraph:SomeGroup.PageName#anchor]]

	[[includePar:SomeGroup.PageName#anchor]]

	[[include-?:SomeGroup.PageName#anchor]]

Using the paragraph symbol, ?, would be nice - I never use that anyway...
(it's on the key to the left of '1' on my keyboard :-)

Or, just augmenting the 'include'-directive with an argument:

	[[include:SomeGroup.PageName#anchor paragraph]]

	[[include:SomeGroup.PageName#anchor para]]

	[[include:SomeGroup.PageName#anchor ?]]]


>
> We also made an in-page version, that's useful for building 
cross-references on FAQ pages. It allows authors to pick up the text of a 
"Q" and use it to create a link at the top of the page to a paragraph 
further down the page. One use for this would be on the 
TextFormattingRules page.
> 

I'm actually mainly trying to get a FAQ-section up and running, so I'd be
interested in looking at your site - what's the URI?


 > This approach could be generalised to include a selected paragraph in a 
search results page in 2 ways:
> 
> - if a [[#desc]] anchor exists, use that paragraph
> 
> - otherwise (optionally) display the first paragraph

Using a anchor to specify the description sounds interesting... 
but I'd suggest [[#pageDescription]] instead, since 'desc'/'description' 
aren't that uncommon as anchor names already.

Defaulting to the first paragraph when there is no description sounds good 
sounds like a pretty good strategy.

/Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderstr?m, +46-8-768 39 44		http://www.md.kth.se/~chr