[pmwiki-users] Again: looking to add more randomness

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2006 at 08:41:44PM -0800, Comit wrote:
> Well, here's the Random Page mod:
> http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/RandomPage
> 
> It's almost there.  But as you can see you have to type in all the pages to 
> include.
> Would be perfect if you could just do:
> 
> (:randpage Banners/*) meaning to include all pages.

How about the following instead?  (I'm looking to add this to
beta26.)

    (:pagelist group=Banners order=random count=1 fmt=#include list=normal:)

Then one can select random pages from any pagelist.  The above
will pick a "normal" page from the Banners group.  One could also do
things like

  - from a trail
    (:pagelist group=Banners.IndexTrail order=random count=1 fmt=#include :)

  - random page from a category (i.e., pages marked with [[!Banners]])
    (:pagelist link=Category.Banners order=random count=1 fmt=#include :)

This could also be used for the "Did You Know" capability,
if you're willing to place each quote into its own wiki page:

    %comment% display three quotes
    (:pagelist group=Quotes order=random count=3 fmt=#include :)

But there's also some advantage to be had by maintaining the
quotes in a single page, so...

I've looked at the Cookbook.RandomQuotes recipe, and it's not
designed at all the way I would've done it.  I think that it 
ought to support multi-line quotations, and embedded wiki markup, 
and not use the bullet character to separate quotations.  Better would be
to format the quotes page and file as something like:

    [[#yoda]]
    * Do, or do not.  There is no "try".
    -> Yoda

    [[#grandmother]]
    * The impossible is only a little bit harder.
    -> My Grandmother

    [[#churchill_hell]]
    * When you're going through hell, keep going.
    -> Winston Churchill

Then the random quote recipe could do something like

    (:randquote QuotesPage count=3:)

and grab + include three quotes at random from the page.  Formatting
things this way also promotes re-use, since an author can then
grab a specific quote with

    (:include QuotesPage#grandmother:)

I'll see about writing a version based on this design sometime
later today. 

Pm