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

[Chris Cox]

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> 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:

Style wise, if we can fix the format of the items... we
can justify the block of them so things might look prettier.

Also, if there is going to be some kind of style to these
we might want to wikistyle/css it.

I'm thinking:

Summary:     Blah Blah
Version:     1.0
Status:      Stable
...etc..

Do it with markup and we could really go wild!

(:cookbook summary='Blah Blah' version='1.0' ...

I like the idea of using markup... then the format is
more controlled.

> 
> 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
> 
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