Help:DPL Examples/Example 1

With DPL you can do simple and useful things like Sort articles on people by last name.

But there is much more you can do. Our demo web site contains some articles on fictitious countries (this is also the name of their common category).

They all use a template named "Country" which has parameters like capital. The template produces a small table and a link to the country list we want to generate. There are chapters on religion and history in most of the articles. We show how to create a sortable wikitable list of those articles which gives some excerpts of the contents.

DPL can be used as a mediawiki parser extension, which means that a special DPL tag is used:

parser extension syntax  category=Fictitious country includepage={Country} dpl,#History,#Religion[20],revolution addpagecounter=true format=¶{|class="wikitable sortable" ¶!Country ¶!Official Name ¶!Capital ¶!Dial Code ¶!History ¶!Religion ¶!Revolutions,¶|-¶|%PAGE% (%COUNT%),,¶|} secseparators=¶| 

We select articles by category ("Fictitious Country") and explain that we want to see contents from the template "Country" and from two chapters. And we want to transclude text which is contained between special section markers named "revolution". We truncate the text on religion to a maximum of 20 characters. We create a sortable table which contains the article name (as a link) and its access frequency in the first column and the content pieces in the other columns. Note that at the end of truncated contents you will find a small arrow which links directly to the chapter from where the contents was taken. The formatting for the template variables is done in a special template which is by convention named after the original template plus a suffix (Template:Country dpl in our case). This template is very simple; it only presents the values for name, capital and dial code as columns of a table. The transcluded contents from the marked sections ("revolution") is not changed in any way. Note that only the text between the markers is transcluded, not the whole sentence.

As wiki syntax depends on line breaks we must use a symbol to represent a line break ("\n" or "¶" are possible).

country list
 category=Fictitious country includepage={Country} dpl,#History,#Religion[20],revolution addpagecounter=true format=¶{|class="wikitable sortable" ¶!Country ¶!Official Name ¶!Capital ¶!Dial Code ¶!History ¶!Religion ¶!Revolutions,¶|-¶|%PAGE% (%COUNT%),,¶|} secseparators=¶| 

country list (2)
DPL can also be used as a mediawiki parser function, which is more powerful as it allows DPL to be used within templates, parameters being template calls or variable expansions. The syntax looks a bit different.

Special care must be taken if you need the pipe symbol ("|") as contents of your statements. This happens for example, when you want to define a wiki table. We offer two ways for that purpose:
 * the classic way, i.e. define special macros like (! with a contents of {| (this is common practice in wikipedia).
 * use the special symbol ¦; this symbol looks very similar to the pipe character and is therefore more elegant.

See two examples (with identical results) to understand the difference:

Have a look at a more realistic example ...