[pmwiki-users] want opinions on a new cookbook recipe format

[Patrick R. Michaud]

I'm thinking it would be a good idea to evolve the formatting of
cookbook recipes slightly, so that instead of the "Question / Answer"
preamble at the top of the page, we have a section that reads more like:

    Summary:  short description of the recipe
    Status:
    Prerequisites:
    Maintainer:
    Categories:
    Votes:

and then begin with the description of the recipe.

I have several reasons for doing this -- first, I think it makes it
a lot easier for people to find things, but it will also
eventually allow us to do more PITS-like queries on the recipes,
such as automatically generating recipe lists and sorting them
on various criteria.  (Eventually each of the above will become
a page property, so that one could sort recipes by votes, status,
maintainer, etc.)

I've already reformatted a few pages with the new format, for illustration:

    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/RandomQuote
    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/RotateMarkup
    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/GuiEdit
    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/ExcelPaste
    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/SharedPages
    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/EditTemplates
    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/ChangeTimeFormat

Any comments?  If there's broad agreement, I'll adjust the default
Cookbook.Template to the new format.

If we do adopt the new format, there's no imperative to convert
all of the recipes over at once -- it can happen slowly over time
as people find things.  An easy way to find which recipes have
not been converted will be to do something like:

    (:pagelist group=Cookbook -"Status: " :)

which will find all of the cookbook pages that do not have "Status: "
lines.

Thanks,

Pm