“ We really only need it for 1948 and President Truman, plus somewhere in 1907/8, as those are the only categories where we have EOs which cross into a new digit (9999 -> 10000 etc.) . On the other hand, maybe more cross-categories will be created someday (executive orders related to particular topics) , so who knows. We could just let the individual EO pages specify a DEFAULTSORT, and not apply anything inside the template -- we would have to put that in all lettered EOs plus all EOs < 10000. ”

“ It is not always a great idea to have templates define DEFAULTSORT but this may be a good exception. Yeah, I started with getting presidential seal/flag EOs to support the en-wiki article I was working on, and have taken detours into finding other EOs with graphics. I found a library which has the physical book versions of many of the CFR Title 3 compilations, so have scanned a bunch of them (and end up adding nearby EOs when I happened to have scanned their text) . Not all that many seem to have graphics actually. ”

“ Since the month and day are always going to be needed to be passed, it is more natural to provide year along with that rather than calculate them. But, you could always put in the full year checks from your template in the nara_override field (rename it nara_url maybe) for each president if you wanted, and remove the #if from the main template. I also added a check to not print out the Federal Register stuff if fr-year is not provided, since that started in March 1936 and lots of EOs predate it. ”

“ Yeah, it can take a while to get the hang of template editing -- I'm not too great at it myself. However... using the "title" as a parameter to a category isn't the best idea, since that is only a sort key, and (as I forgot with EO 9902) it needs to be padded to work right. ”

“ Oh I don't like the workaround much either - BUT I realized the farther back in time you go, the more UnNumbered EOs you come across too. The re-use of {{{title}}} along with adding {{{next}}} and {{{previous}}} can handle both the Alpha EOs and the un-numbered ones as well. I believe you're right about the Alpha-EOs getting slim once the FR comes into existance after FDR. In that case, for pre 1936 EOs and similar - you can keep {{{eo}}} for the auto interlink feature plus the signing date date (with no NARA url) and also use {{{title}}} for the Alphas (see above) . ”

“ If you go that route, then I would change the name of the param to "nara_url" since it is not an override anymore; and if you do then you don't need the #if in the parent template; you can just invoke the sub-template once to get the URL part. The letter EOs are going to be nasty; they may require specific overrides on everything (as well as the prev/next links on adjoining EOs) . I also put in number ranges for Taft, Wilson, and Coolidge. I tried to make 3885A work but it would take a ton of effort to get those to work. ”

“ Yeah... lots of orders were for exempting specific individuals from civil service rules and the like. I think eventually presidents have figured out ways to avoid a lot of the repetitive ones to cut down the volume. It seems like before 1907, orders were often just sent to the departments which were affected, so there was no central list. And before the Federal Register, there was no central place they were printed, so the most common seems to have been departments printing the EOs which applied to them in their annual reports, meeting minutes, etc. ”

“ They work fine. I started with using ul as a test, then switched them to use a basic table (of which formatting should then be very easy to change) . I didn't bother adding any federal register page arguments, as I think that is overkill and makes the templates harder for pre-1936 EOs, but it could be done. See User:Clindberg/eolist-begin (which would have the table definition and headers) , User:Clindberg/eolist-end, and User:Clindberg/eolist-item (one for each EO) ) . Example of usage at User:Clindberg/eolist-test, with some of Taft's 1909 orders. ”

“ Doesn't matter much though, they really don't hurt anything to have them there. The workaround is to basically override everything, which is fine. However it would be nice to have the presidential part still work. Using a decimal number would let that happen (and technically also the NARA URLs, although they only have pages from 1937 and on, and since I don't think there have been any lettered EOs since the Federal Register started, none of them actually *need* NARA URLs) . ”

“ If the reader cannot make the mental leap to look down one (OK 3 alpha's down max) for the NARA citation starting from the base EO # to validate that "yes indeed dash 'B' came after no-dash 'A' that came after the just the number", then I don't think any of this really matters if folks are that clueless. Keeping {{{eo}}} will still get all the auto stuff to come up; it's the instances for proper display that is the hang up IMO. It also winds up adding a third variant when the unumbered depression-era or war-time EOs come up. ”

“ Trimming the 'fat' should come right before the goofball beveled borders get fixed at the end when everything important has been tested to death and working IMO. Well I've discovered that deleting the | eo = when applying the template to workaround for those EOs with letters in them stops the expression bangs. ”

“ The main point of the template is to auto-detect the president, so I'd rather find a way to make that work with alpha EOs, since otherwise there is little point in using it. Clindberg (talk) 15:40, 18 October 2009 (UTC) {{potus-eo-data}} works for me too and I prefer it standalone than be a be a subpage. The decimal parameter between whole numbers is just fine --- but I have the benifit of this process to rationalize it while future template users do not. That's really the only concern as far as documentation goes. ”

“ I'd prefer leaving both variances of titles out of the content portions until you get to the Fed Reg controlled EOs personally and let the one in the header template be the only one we use. What do you think?
oh and I discovered a nifty litle template that they have beeen using to indent paragraphs over on Statutes at Large -- {{gap}}. I've adopted using it and figure its use could be beneficial overall. You should check it out since double spacing without using &+nbsp; doesn't work in wiki much if at all. ”

“ I would love to just extract all the fonts and formatting specs to see if it's possible to just mimic the orginal Compilation of Presidental Documents layout for the EOs/Procs that were added from Press Releases and similar to make the collections more uniform across all the Administrations (& more credible in the process) . George Orwell III (talk) 07:46, 31 October 2009 (UTC) Basic HTML lists (which is what those are) shouldn't be unreadable... odd. There were complaints on the EO listing pages in particular? That is an interesting development on the Federal Register though... ”

“ As stated in the preface to Deschler’s Precedents, " [t] hese volumes set forth and analyze the modern precedents of the House of Representatives.... It is the function of these volumes to review the precedents from 1936 through the first session of the 93d Congress, except as otherwise noted." The compilation has since been expanded to include precedents developed beyond the 94th Congress. By law, the precedents must be updated every two years. ”

“ Since 1976, Deschler’s Precedents has been prepared under the supervision of Wm. Holmes Brown, Parliamentarian from 1974 to 1994, as is reflected in the name of volumes 10 through 16 (Deschler-Brown Precedents) . ”

“ Going to a tabled listing is unavoidable. The far right FR column will just go blank and act as a spacer if at all for the pre-Fed Reg EOs I guess. George Orwell III (talk) 05:59, 13 January 2010 (UTC) We would have three templates. One to put in whatever should come at the start of the list, one for the end. And then one template for each EO, which takes the EO number, date, and subject as arguments. We can then format as we like. For example we could make the start template simply "

", the end template "

", and the line template "

[↩︎]

“ Hoover) nara_url sections, since their pages only go back to the start of 1937 (i.e., the first full year of the Federal Register) . But I guess it doesn't hurt as long as we have the year info; maybe it will help at some point. Since these year sections are inside the "if" sections of each president, the "bookend" conditions don't need to be repeated -- which is why I removed those. I also tweaked the top-level template to avoid showing a double line at the bottom if no notes are supplied. I think it all looks pretty good now. ”

“ Pretty sure without the "" | "" at the end of each expression, any blanking of {{{eo}}} kicks out something like this.... >DELETED<
.... which I assume only reduces the number of ways to possibly solve that while still disabling the NARA link whenever applicable but still keeping the auto interlink back to the author's EO page with the signing date. Again, I'm no expert but if my slap-dash research was right, always including that extra "bookend" is always preferable over having no "default" (which = a blank parameter I believe) . ”

“ That should only be needed on the lettered or otherwise non-numeric EOs; all other ones will now sort correctly in all their categories. It should now be a relatively simple matter to add the per-president categories to the subtemplate. Clindberg (talk) 14:58, 28 October 2009 (UTC) Oh, by the way -- does using {{PL-indent}} on the EO listing pages actually look good to you? I use Safari and Firefox, and it looks *horrible* -- the text overlays the bullet points making it unreadable. ”

“ Clindberg (talk) 14:27, 14 October 2009 (UTC) Sorry for the long delay - life throws a curve ball every now and then. All excellent points btw and good catch on the EOs with a letter suffix too. It's obvious that something needs to be done about the Pre - 1930's EOs but I'd like to see what happens if I move all those expressions to a helper template first. ”

“ I went and added a "eo_dec" parameter, and an example on your Test List page. Only next/previous need to be overridden; the NARA page, the presidential link, and the title all work fine if not supplied. Clindberg (talk) 06:07, 18 October 2009 (UTC) If you figure that's another available way to make life easy -- I'm all for it!!! George Orwell III (talk) 06:24, 18 October 2009 (UTC) I went searched for Alpha-EOs and found maybe about 2 dozen between Truman and Ike (nothing afterwards) and added them to the listings on their sub-pages. ”

“ That should still work in my template (which also means you can generate incorrect URLs by specifying that incorrectly) . I don't see much use in trying to defend against incorrect years, but it may be a good idea to defend against *missing* years. Clindberg (talk) 15:51, 13 October 2009 (UTC) Ooh, there is another issue. EO numbers aren't always... numbers. ”