you're right, the "storylink" idea is much better. maybe from the user's point of view it would be nice to have one "link" macro that applies autoTitles to everything without a "text" parameter, but weighing in all the otehr arguments, i'm totally for "storylink".

(Also, I think it's a mistake to evaluate the link target as local story even if the slash is not the first character in the URL.) i don't think so -- it works with the site.link macro, which doesn't require a leading slash.

(Robert, Tobi: don't we have something like this already?) i also thought that something like this should exist already, maybe a way to reference a story object from a macro. but i didn't find anything when checking the macro help, so i came up with this idea.

Well, maybe

<% link story="23423" %>

would even be better. We wouldn't have to add another macro and still provide a clear distinction that a macro tag is targeted to a local story.

We could also just keep it as

<% link to="23423" %>

that would reduce the ammount of macro syntax writers have to keep in their head and still be fairly easy for us to parse.

a macro that does what nex described doesn't exist so far, although it would be possible to do something like that using a bunch of undocumented features ;-) which doesn't count.

i'm +1 for a new "storylink"-macro, mainly because of the caching of rendered stories: if we would adapt the link-macro, we would have to exclude stories containing a link-macro from caching (and i assume that a lot of stories have that macro embedded).

another possibility would be to adapt the existing global story_macro() as follows: <% story id="2345" as="link" %>

What would it take to allow the macros themselves to mark the stories they're contained in as uncacheable? Macros don't know the story they're contained in, but something like this could work:

where storyparts are rendered:

  res.data.contentIsCachable = true;
  //  render content parts as skin
  ...
  // check if some macro in content does not want to be cached
  if (res.data.contentIsCachable) {
      // do caching
      ...

and in a macro that doesn't want to be cached:

  res.data.contentIsCachable = false;

thoughts? We could also set limited cachability by setting a date.

(suggested by robert above.) this wouldn't be obvious to new users, but looks really cool.

by the way, what about <% story.createtime as="link" %>? ;-)