Issue:Labeling Sections from Templates

Description:	Section labeling doesn't seem to work from within templates.
Extension / Version:	DPL   /   1.6.8
Type / Status:	Bug   /   open

Problem

My problem is related to labeling sections for future labeled section transclusion. Let's say I have the following page:

<section begin=foo />

Some text.

<section end=foo />

Instead of having the raw section tags, though, I want to have two templates:

Template:BeginFoo

<section begin=foo />

Template:EndFoo

<section end=foo />

such that I can do the following:

{{BeginFoo}}

Some text.

{{EndFoo}}

The problem is, this doesn't seem to work! Looking at the DPL code, I'm guessing this is because the section tag is rendered to an empty string, so when the BeginFoo template is transcluded, the section tag is rendered and not actually present in the calling page.

Workaround

The only workaround I can think of is to call

{{subst:BeginFoo}}

Some text.

{{subst:EndFoo}}

but that is less than desirable.

--Evan Sultanik 21:16, 25 March 2008 (CET)

Reply

Indeed DPL relies on the fact that the section tag is physically present within the raw wiki text. Maybe DPL could learn to understand someting like {{begin section|Foo}} but I can´t see an advantage in this.

Gero 21:35, 25 March 2008 (CET)

The intended use

Here is the advantage (or at least why I am interested):

I am trying to use DPL to be the framework behind a nice RSS feed infrastructure, much like what Dmb was talking about. For example, let's say I have an article called Blog Entry; in that article I could do something like:

Some text...

{{BeginFeed
|date=2008/03/25
|author=[[User:Gero|Gero]]}}

This text will appear in the RSS feed.

{{EndFeed}}

where the BeginFeed and EndFeed templates would add section tags as described above.

Then, I could have a separate article, called something like BlogFeed to aggregate all of the feed items using DPL:

<dpl> 
uses=Template:BeginFeed
include=feedcontent,{BeginFeed}:date,{BeginFeed}:author
ordermethod=firstedit
order=descending
format=,[[%PAGE%|%TITLE%]],,
</dpl>

--Evan Sultanik 21:49, 25 March 2008 (CET)