User talk:Dr ishmael/Nicholas the Traveler tmpl

This needs to return the correct starting date for the requested week; this can be computed from the index (store that in a variable before you switch on it?). That way, you get the correct week start date, and the correct filename. I suggest exposing both of these as filenames.

I'm not happy with having the DPL here at all because of the performance; it is used even if it is not needed. -- ◄mendel► 19:59, July 20, 2010 (UTC)


 * Re date: I had originally thought of doing that, but forgot to include it before.
 * Re map: Full image link or just a filename? I did filename because you might want to display the image in some places, but only link to it in other places.  This introduces a slight complication with the very first week - because Nick wasn't introduced until Thursday, we've been listing that week as starting on 4/23, and the map was named as such, but to be consistent with the Monday dating of all other weeks it should be 4/20.
 * Re dialogue: When the template is only used once, like it would be on the Main Page, the difference would be negligible. The use of #vars doesn't affect Wikia's caching, either, so the MP would still only be recalculated every 2 hours or so (I think that's the interval?) unless someone manually purged it.
 * I can understand being concerned about performance if we used this template, say, 66 times on the same page, like on my current test page. (With dialogue, it takes ~7 seconds; without, 4 seconds.  So I do acknowledge that there is an impact on performance.)  However, I really only did that to demonstrate what this could do, not what we should do.
 * What I was thinking of doing was to use the tablerow template only for new lines in the table, so we could go ahead and set those up for the next month/quarter/year and not have to worry about updating them weekly. For the summary tables, I would simply take the existing numbers (which cover all the static rows already in the table) and add them to the computed variable (which would count all the dynamically-generated rows).  Likewise, I'd only have to variable-ize the checklist for the areas Nick hasn't yet visited.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael Diablo_the_chicken.gif 21:36, July 20, 2010 (UTC)