[pmwiki-devel] markup advice needed: (:select:) tag?

[Ben Stallings]

Kathryn Anderson wrote,
> How about (:dataquery select name=eventid label=eventname:)?
> The advantages of this are:
> - guaranteed not to conflict
> - expandable to other custom markup you might want to add in future,
>   just use a different "command" rather than "select"
> - only one Markup needed -- match on (:dataquery command args:) and use
>   ParseArgs to parse the args.

All very true, and I'll seriously consider that; thank you, Kathryn.

The reason I haven't gone that way yet is that the goal of the DataQuery 
recipe is to be completely transparent to page authors (as opposed to 
administrators, who set up the queries)... database records act just 
like wiki pages, so ideally, if I've done my job right, authors will not 
even need to know that the recipe is there, let alone what it's called.

If the tag is named (:dataquery:), then in order to remember the name of 
the tag while writing pages, authors will have to learn that there is a 
recipe called DataQuery, and what it does, when really all they want is 
a drop-down menu whose values are pulled from existing pages.

But on the other hand, this "select" function will only work in page 
groups that are powered by DataQuery anyway (since the whole reason I 
need the function is because pagelists are timing out), so that's a bit 
of a giveaway.  Maybe I should just go with it.

Thanks for the feedback!  Do other folks agree with Kathryn?  --Ben