rendering sub-entries

Steven mentioned how the comments plugin directly accesses the blosxom 
renderer's outputTemplate method to handle what I'm going to refer to as a 
"sub-entry".

For every story there are zero-to-many comments where each comment is a 
"sub-entry" and needs to be rendered with its own template.  But we 
currently have no ability to handle "sub-entries".

What other things could be done with sub-entries?  Could we do entry 
revisions with sub-entries?  Would that be interesting?  Perhaps some 
metadata could be rendered as a sub-entry?

Each entry has a list of entries of its own.

When someone looks at a URI for an index ( /blog/2005, /blog/somecategory, 
/blog, ...), then they see a list of the entries--but we don't render any 
of the sub-entries.

When someone looks at a URI for a specific entry, then they see the entry 
with all of its sub-entries rendered.

To render the sub-entries for an entry, we'd render the hierarchy 
depth-first.  Sub-entries don't have to be related at all.  They'd get 
naturally ordered because the plugins populating the sub-entry list 
would be run one after another.  The order of the sub-entry groups would 
be decided by the order the plugins are loaded.  We could end up with 
something like this:

   story entry
     |- metadata sub-entry
     |
     |- trackback sub-entry
     |- trackback sub-entry
     |- trackback sub-entry
     |
     |- comment sub-entry
     |- comment sub-entry
     |- comment sub-entry
     |  |- comment sub-entry
     |
     |- comment form sub-entry

That might be kind of interesting since it'd grab comments, trackbacks, 
and any other "sub-entry" kinds of things.  We could even beef up the 
comments plugin to see a hierarchy of comments which might be interesting.

Any thoughts on this?

/will

-- 
whatever it is, you can find it at http://www.bluesock.org/~willg/
except Will--you can only see him in real life.


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