getting further along with rewriting and rearranging the helma documentation at hopdev, i treated myself with another gift: the list macro.

if you take a look at the introduction to the section "image processing" you'll see a list of image functions at the bottom of the text.

this list was created by the macro call <% list filter="topic" name="Image Processing" itemprefix="<li>" itemsuffix="</li>" %>

it simply loops over the stories contained in the topic named "Image Processing" and displays their titles as links to themselves.

future applications of this macro could be lists of weblogs and users, too (that's why there is that filter parameter already).

there is just one question left: with the new extended content scheme i don't have a clue how i could sort this list by titles except if i put them into an array and do it in javascript...?

btw. i checked in these modifications as well as those made for the shortcut macro into a new branch called helmaville.

looks nice! reg. sorting: i think doing the sorting in javascript is the only way, but would have the benefit that the macro could be even more flexible (eg. sortby="[name|createtime|modifytime]" order="[asc|desc]").

We certainly need a macro to generate various lists. I'm not very convinced of having one generic "list" macro that is able to list anything, since that merely puts the complexity into the attributes. So I propose to call that macro "liststories" or "storylist" instead, and then add other macros for listing sites, users etc as we implement them. Otherwise, you'd need to specify somewhere that you want stories to be listed (using for example an attribute like 'what="stories"'), unless you'd take that implicitly from the Filter="topic".

Also, I find the

filter="topic" name="Image Processing"

attributes too verbose. By the attribute names alone, it's also not very clear that the name attribute belongs to the filter attribute, unless they are in the exact sequence as in your example. I think we could replace these two with

topic="Image Processing"

What happens if no filter is specified? I'd say this would produce a list of 10 or 20 recent stories on the weblog frontpage. Any other ideas?