Forum:Cerberus Daily News templates

I've done a bit of thinking about this, and I believe that several new templates should be created in order to make it easier to find related articles, and to make it easier to change how all articles are displayed. The templates are summarized here:

Template:CDNStory: has date, headline, and content parameters. Takes these parameters and formats the story.

Template:CDNSeries: Allows for date-based linking between stories that belong to a series. (This template relies on some formatting that the CDNStory template does to work its magic. This template doesn't otherwise seem feasible to me.)

Regarding the duplication issue: DynamicPageList2 is amazingly useful for copying content verbatim from another page. To that effect, we should be using it for the "Cerberus Daily News" main page. That page will include the most recent month's content directly from the archive. By doing this, an editor only has to add the story once, and have it replicated automatically on the front page. Two templates accomplish this:

Template:CDNStories: Takes a "month year" parameter, uses this to pull all the stories from that month's archive.

Template:CDNLatestStory: Also takes a "month year" parameter, and pulls the latest story from that month's archive.

I have working implementations of these templates linked in my sandbox. If it looks like people want these templates, and more technically-minded folks don't see major problems with the code I have (I'm still quite new at this), then I'll move them to the Template namespace so they can be further edited, and eventually used. What do people think? Dammej 04:05, July 1, 2010 (UTC)