[pmwiki-users] Variations on Commentbox and its variants

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Wed Sep 20 19:10:43 CDT 2006


On Thursday, 21 September 2006 3:34 AM, Michael Gleicher <gleicher at cs.wisc.edu> wrote:
>I would like to have pages that allow for quick entry of new 
>information. The Commentbox recipe (and CommentBoxStyled and CommentBox 
>Plus) almost get me what I want. Unfortunately, my PHP skills aren't 
>quite up to the point where I can hack it, so I could use a
>little guidance.
>
>Some of the simple things I'd like to do:
>1) have a (:commentbox:) that has the same behavior as having the page 
>named "Diary" (e.g. the way the formatted results look with only the 
>date, ...)

- the value 'Diary' is a variable; suppose you wanted all pages ending
  in 'Comment' to behave like Diary pages, you would add the following
  line to local/config.php, above the line that includes commentbox.php

    $DiaryPattern = '/Comment$/';

  this will automatically load the (:diarybox:) directive on those pages


>2) have a (:commentbox:) that just creates a list item (so the entire 
>formatting is "* comment text\n"

- this *may* be simplest to do with a new form, as the current
  commentbox code assumes there is always a date in the posting

  try the following in local/config.php and use (:commentbox:) markup
  in the page

    $MultipleItemsPerDay = false;
    $MPDateTimeFmt = "\n* ";
    $MPItemEndFmt  = "\n";

  you will also want to copy the code that defines $CommentBoxFmt
  into local/config.php,  remove the lines that prompt for the
  author and use input type='text' instead of a textarea for the 
  comment (put this above the call that includes commentbox.php)


>3) have a (:commentbox:) that asks for a 1-line title in addition to the 
>text itself, and creates postings that are blog-like.

- this is on my to-do list, but there are other recipes more suitable
  for blog-like postings, so I have given it a low priority

>
>I think that 1 and 2 simply involve changing the values of various 
>strings, but I'm neither sure of how to set the values nor how to do 
>this on a per-page basis. (different pages on the same Wiki do different 
>things).
>
>I am thinking that this (definitely #3, but maybe just having a 
>parameterized comment box to do #1 and #2) will involve at least some 
>hacking of the commentboxplus recipe.

The commentbox code should really be rewritten to take advantage
of features available in pmwiki that didn't exist when it was first
created. As I understand it, such a capability is coming "soonish" to
pmwiki itself, so again I havew given it a low priority.
>
>I'd appreciate any advice on how to do this.  Even more basic things 
>like how do I learn the basics of hacking inside of PMWiki (like, what 
>does "SDV" do? - and where is it documented).

SDV is incredibly useful. It says "if this variable already has a
value, use it; otherwise, use this value". It allows recipe authors
to set default values, then individual administrators can over-ride
these with local values, without having to change the recipe.


>
>Sorry if this is a newbie question, my PHP skills aren't quite up to 
>understanding the code to the cookbook entries

Well the code that posts commentbox entries is handling a lot of
different cases, and has slowly accreted complexity as more cases
were added. If it were a ship, it would need to go into a dry
dock for a refit.


-- 
JR
--
John Rankin







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