Template talk:PanamaPresidents

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You may notice that it's not terribly common to create a new succession template for an office, even heads of states. As of this writing, the only customized succession templates for heads of state are for The United States, Canada, and now Panama. There is a generic Succession Template that I considered using, but I made a custom template for a few reasons:

• I was curious about the technology of navigational templates -- hey, let's be honest
• I wanted to use starting and ending dates rather than just years, because many terms of Panamanian Presidents were over within the first year, especially in the case of provisional and acting Presidents. Also, not all Presidents took office on the same day, such as is generally the case in the United States. For this reason, I wanted the template to support the entire date and that would require changing a very widely-used template
• Although I haven't personally taken the time to do it, I supposed that someone along the way might want the Panama Presidents navigational template to have a distinct look, using the countries colors or an image from Panama or something like that.

Another thing you might notice about this template is that it categorizes articles that implement it in the Panama Presidents category. As a programmer, I figured less code is a good thing, but now I'm not positive. I noticed that the Presidents all appear on the category page, but they're alphabetized by FIRST name instead of last. That answereed my question about why people sometimes put the title of the page in a Category tag, because it turns out that if you put say "Category:Foo|Smith, John", then the article is alphabetized first by last name. Good point. So that made me wish I had included the Category tags in each Presidential page rather than in the template.

I should say at this point that I wrote a Perl script to generate all the Wiki code for each President, for the navigational template code and, where necessary, to create the initial stub article on previously-nonexistent Presidents. Having already done that for all of them, it's a drag to now wish I had included something else since it would have been so easy before.

I figured it was still a good idea to keep the categorization in the template, as long as we could have the category tag use the proper sorting information. So I tried changing the category tag to something like this: "Category:Panama Presidents|{{{lastname}}}, {{{firstname}}}" and then adding (yes, to each and every President article) the lastname and firstname parameters to the Template include code. But that didn't seem to work.

Anyway, work in progress. Just wanted to pass on the things that I've been thinking about.

My understanding of the succession template is that you can include more detailed dates in the years field just by writing them in. I also notice that there's something in the code that makes it clash with the normal succession template (see my edits to Jorge Illueca as an example). Is there a way around this? Ziggurat 01:59, 9 May 2006 (UTC)