Category talk:News

Better ways?

"Preparing for a better way of doing the News" - what you guys have now looks pretty good to me. The least useful part of it is probably the category, with its current arrangement, except that it seems to be the only easy way to find items from 2007. If the software could arrange items by date, the category would be much better at doing that, though it has no immediately apparent value for any year for which you have a calendar displayed.

I'm interested in the Simple Calendar extension (for adding to a couple of Wikia sites). Created a personal one to see what it looked like. Are there any others here? I have some notes on one of my pages about how categories could be used to create a master list for a particular day etc. Can the software be modified to do extra things like that automatically?

What about future dates? Would your current "News" sytem list them first or not at all?

It's done as a DPL query which is currently selecting all pages using the News template and ordering them by their creation date. The query could be modified to order by the date in the title and filter for past dates only. Here's the current DPL query from the news page source:

{{#dpl:uses=Template:News
 | notuses=Template:Webpage
 | namespace=
 | count={{#var:items}}
 | offset={{#var:offset}}
 | include=*
 | mode=none
 | ordermethod=firstedit
 | order=descending
}}

It occurred to me that the news items would be improved if each were in a category for the main contributor(s) (or just signed as on a talk page) and/or for the subject-matter.

Robin Patterson 00:42, 6 April 2011 (PDT)