New Message: Re: News items on home page show postTime differently

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Address: http://frontier.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$11842

By: Paul Howson (phowson at flexi.net.au)

I had a similar problem in a Radio weblog. In Radio, these "news item" macros are "evaluated" using just string search and replace, not by parsing stuff between curly braces and evaluating it as a script. For this reason, putting extra function call stuff inside the curly braces caused the evaluation to fail. The only way around this was to write a special script which grabbed stuff out of the message table directly, reformatted it and returned the desired result. Easy in Radio, not so easy in Manila without server access (my Manila sites are hosted at weblogger).

So calling these special news item tokens "macros" is a bit misleading inasmuch as they are not evaluated like ordinary Manila macros. What this means is that you can't use them in conjunction with other macros and verbs to modify their results. And if the results aren't what you need (e.g. US date format in non-US country) then you're stuck.

It would seem the solution to this date format problem would be either:

(1) Make the evaluation of news item "macros" work like other macros so you can add extra function calls inside the curly braces. OR

(2) Add prefs to control how the special news item macros generate their results, esp. the date format. There could be a pref which offers a variety of date formats for the postTime "macro" (and any other date-related macros in news items).

What do you think Lawrence?

This is a Manila site.. http://manila.userland.com/.