[pmwiki-users] Summary line in PITS and Cookbook

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Mon Jun 19 12:51:42 CDT 2006


On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 12:21:20AM -0400, Pico wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> >On Sat, Jun 17, 2006 at 04:59:29PM -0400, Pico wrote:
> >>The Cookbook and PITS groups both generate a "Summary: " line at the top 
> >>of each new page.
> >>
> >>In the PITS group, the "Summary:"appears as the very first line of 
> >>markup on every page.
> >>
> >>In the Cookbook group, however, the "Summary:"
> >>(1) appears as the second line of markup: the first line is used for the 
> >>style: >>recipeinfo<<
> >>(2) does not appear on many older pages
> >>(3) appears on other lines on a few transitional pages
> >>
> >>It would be nice to get the Summary line to appear as the first line of 
> >>markup on Cookbook pages.  
> >
> >Why is it important to have the Summary line appear as the first
> >line of markup?
> >
> 
> >As an example of where this is being used, see
> >http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/Cookbook-ByCategory ,
> >which uses (:pagelist:) to construct a list of cookbook recipes,
> >using the Summary line from each as the description.
> >
> 
> Are these only enabled within the Cookbook group?  

At the moment I have them enabled only within the Cookbook; I didn't
see much need to enable them outside of the cookbook.  You're right
that we might want them enabled for search purposes.... but I think
I'd prefer to fix the overall search capabilities rather than
make things too special-purpose on pmwiki.org .

In general, I don't want pmwiki.org to stray *too* far from a default
PmWiki installation.  In other words, if performing a search on
pmwiki.org returns some highly specialized results, it ought to be
documented somewhere (i.e., a recipe) how someone can duplicate
that capability on their own site.  Otherwise people get disappointed
when their copy of PmWiki doesn't do everything the pmwiki.org site
does, and I don't like disappointing people.  :-)

> If these are only enabled in the Cookbook group, are there any plans to 
> enable outside of the group?  At one point, you mentioned in your thread 
> "Want opinions on a new cookbook  recipe format", that "I'm eventually 
> hoping to extend this concept to allow field-based searching of pages, 
> it's probably better to prototype the cookbook this way.  If we later 
> decide a directive-based form is better, it'll be no problem for me to 
> write a script that converts them all at once.
> 
> Is that still in the works?

Well, I haven't gotten a lot of feedback or response on either
the new format or the field-based searching of pages, so in keeping
with PmWikiPhilosophy #3 I've not pursued it too heavily.  :-)

> On the other hand, since we have the {$Description}
> page variable generally available, could we have it automatically 
> populated by script on pages that use the Summary: and related 
> descriptive fields (i.e., on pages in the PITS and Cookbook groups)?

Yes, I think this can be done.

To handle searches in general I'm expecting there will be an 
{$Excerpt} page variable, which will return appropriate text based 
on the available search terms, any description available, or the 
first few lines of the page.  But I'm still working on that one.

Pm




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