[pmwiki-users] Title and PTV undesired behaviour

[Hans]

Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 12:38:56 AM, DaveG wrote:

> Hans wrote:
>> Is it possible to achieve this? Would it be desirable that th efirst
>> instance of a PTV will be used by default?
> I suspect this is going to vary very much by author. Personally, I find
> it makes sense that the later definition over-rides the more recent, if
> declared on the same page.

For what reasons?

> If either title or PTV is included from another page, after the initial
> definition, I think a case can be made for either the first or the last
> taking precedence. For titles I'd probably want the first to take 
> precedence. For PTVs I think it would depend very much on what I was 
> trying to do. Either way I think we need a means to choose on a case by
> case basis.

This may not be easy to achieve for PTVs.
An option for the admin to set a variable to control this is simple
enough, but we cannot simply put flags into PTVs.
Therefor I think it is important to set a good core behaviour for
preference of PTVs with identical name.

For any application where a set of PTVs is set at the beginning of a
page, and where content of any sort may be added later, it is
desirable that the PTVs should be evaluated with their first
established values.

This is true for instance for all Cookbook pages which carry an info
section consisting of a number of PTVs.
This is true for applications where category tags of any sort are
added and updated at the beginning of the page.
And updating tags is so much easier if they are ready viewable near
the top.

Using the first PTV rather than last is also an advantage for the
system, as it will stop looking for others when the first is found.

I did add this issue yesterday to PITS:
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/01069
I suggested a specific simple core change there (yet without an
admin switch to change the behaviour so a later PTV will override
first PTV)


  ~Hans