User:Andy Maloney/Notebook/Lab Notebook of Andy Maloney/2010/03/31/Fun with dynamic page listings

I think I have finally gotten something to report for dynamic page listings. It appears that you can setup a template and in the template, write a description for the page. This description can be used as a summary for a dynamic page listing. The code for the dpl is below.


 * namespace=User
 * This just tells dpl to start looking in the special page Users where all our notebooks belong.
 * order=descending
 * I'm pretty sure that this means that the pages shown will show up in dpl in a descending order. I think that the first page shown is not the most recent edited page but the most recent created page.
 * addcategories=true
 * This just allows me to add a list of categories used on the page. Since I am using a user specified format for the output of dpl, I have to include this command as well as the one below in the format.
 * uses=Template:AndyMaloneyNotebook
 * This tells dpl that the pages it should list, must have the template AndyMaloneyNotebook. Otherwise, it won't include it.
 * includepage=
 * So there are two things that I want to include in the list namely, the page name and a description. I have to break up this into two lines (hence the two includepage commands) in order for dpl to format the output in the way I want.
 * format=
 * So you must start this line after the = sign with one comma. You must end it in 2 commas. dpl will allow wiki markup as you can see with the stars and apostrophes dictating a list and bold type. The \n is required for dpl to start a new line.

Output
You can see that if a page does not have any categories listed in it, dpl returns nothing. You can also refine the listing by adding the category= command as given below. Now the only thing that shows up is the page where I have both my template and the category=Kinesin and microtubules.