[ic] Pee-Poor Documentation Rant

Jeff Carnahan interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com
Sun Jan 13 23:49:18 2002


} I wanted to set up a Quote Of The Day (QOTD) on my main page using a file
} that cron generates from 'fortune'.
}

Visiting the IC homepage, I entered "include contents of a file" into the
search box.

I was given a listing of pages that might help me, including one titled
"FILE and INCLUDE".

Clicking on it, I see the handy description of what these tags do:

"FILE and INCLUDE -- These elements read a file from the disk and insert the
contents in the location of the tag."

Thus, with two clicks I've found exactly what solves this problem. The
documentation for the [file] tag is very helpful, it even elaborates on
security risks that (being a good sys admin) I should be aware of.

The documentation for [include] is also very helpful. "Same as [file name]
except interpolates for all Interchange tags and variables." Shall I
deconstruct that? "Same as [file name]" .. Great, so it includes a file for
me. Cool.  "except interpolates for all Interchange tags and variables." ..
Even better, if the file I include into the page has a [page
href="sku_here"]...[/page] tag (or any other Interchange tag or variable) it
will be interpolated. Awesome. Now I can easily save commonly used site
navigation, design and thematic elements into single files (even if they
have IC stuff in them).

Really, I fail to see the difficulty here finding exactly what you wanted to
know.

--
Jeff Carnahan - jcarnahan@networq.com