[pmwiki-users] $ItemDesc

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Tue Feb 28 14:42:22 CST 2006


On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 02:33:01PM -0600, Jon Haupt wrote:
> What would be most useful, I guess, is to figure out where in the
> documentation it should be said that (:description:) puts a value into
> $ItemDesc, and what this property is used for.  I knew about the
> (:description:) markup, and I knew that $ItemDesc was used to fill the
> description fields in RSS feeds, but didn't know that $ItemDesc and
> (:description:) were connected.  

Well, this is still an evolving area, which is why it hasn't been
completely documented yet.  I suspect that the (:description:)
markup should end up in a page variable, and the page variable
should be called {$Description} (instead of $ItemDesc) and that's
what feeds.php should use for now.

$ItemDesc originally used the (:description:) markup if it existed,
otherwise it attempted to substitute the first few lines of text
(the 'excerpt', which is now gone).  All of this was done prior 
to the introduction of page variables, which can do things more
flexibly and in more places.

At any rate, changing $ItemDesc to {$Description} sounds like a
really good idea, and helps to make the connection more apparent.
I'm doing this now for beta33.  We can then put the {$Description} 
markup into the master markup list and the PageVariables page, 
which would help.

Thanks for the very helpful perspective.

Pm





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