Summary doesn't read TWiki Shorthand

Including the first 30 or so words in a search using the $summary variable seems to do a straight regex of the first few charachters, not proplerly doing things like handling things like My Class Page, it just strips the square brackets and continues. This requires a person wanting to use nice formatting in the very beginning of a searched topic to use HTML formatting. I can see where it would be desired to not have a lot of the fancy formatting options to show up on say, WebChanges, but if you're using this for a news system, having links and other stuff auto-format would definately be a good thing. Having a switch in the SEARCH like wikiSyntax="off" by default and optionally be able to turn it on would seem to be a good solution.

I can see where having this auto expand INCLUDEs would scale poorly, as having to render all the includes that show up on WebChanges could potentially be a server-side CPU issue, but expanding stuff that can render into standard HTML seems reasonable.

Test case

Look at WebChanges and see all the INCLUDEs and BASEWEB variables...these would have auto rendered or been completely stripped or something to make the item more readable from a glance.

Environment

-- MikeMaurer - 07 Apr 2002

Follow up

Not expanding VARIABLES is done by design for performance reasons. The Changes page displays many summaries, so slow summary rendering adds up quickly.

Optionally rendering the text with a new switch sounds like a good enhancement.

-- PeterThoeny - 11 Apr 2002

If we ever get to the point of implementing such a switch, I'd like to request that it be a three position switch. The reason is that I expect that most often I'd like to have some TWiki markup rendered properly and some not.

Markup I'd like to be rendered (markup I might call inline markup):

• bold, italic
• links
• honor <nop>
• = (for "inline" verbatim)

Markup I'd usually not like to be rendered (should I call it "not inline" -- stuff that changes the arrangement of the text on the page (and thus might make for ugliness on a summary page):

• bulleted or numbered list markup
• blockquote
• verbatim

I hope you can see my objective -- in one position of the switch we might honor all TWiki markup, in another position we don't honor anything that affects the "layout" of the text. I suspect there are other things to add to both categories above before implementing such a function.

-- RandyKramer - 26 Jul 2002