New Message: MailStory macro

[webmaster at userland.com]

A new message was posted:

Address: http://manila.userland.com/discuss/msgReader$693

By: Matt Deatherage (frontier at gcsf.com)

According to the MailStory macro documentation [1]:

The link will only appear on stories and discussion group messages. On other pages the macro returns the empty string.

This doesn't seem to be true to me - I use Bryan Bell's "Brushed Adamant" theme, which includes the MailStory macro in both the home page and general templates, but the link only appears on story pages - not news items, and not discussion group messages.

In general, I continue to be frustrated at why Manila treats things this way. Internally, everything is a "message," but some messages can only appear in certain places and not others, and some features only work with some classes of messages, and vice-versa. How come I can't promote a discussion group message to the home page if I want? Why can't I add an "E-mail this" link to a news item?

I understand and appreciate that "news item" messages should behave a certain way by default, and "story" messages a different way, and so on - but Manila always stands in my way if I /want/ a given kind of content to behave differently. Is there some reason for this, other than "we wrote it that way and never changed it?" It really limits Manila's flexibility to me.

[1] http://macros.userland.com/basic/mailstory

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