Board Thread:Support Requests - Designing Your Wikia/@comment-26151461-20150705161337/@comment-957747-20150708195602

I think the main confusion here was that the allotted space on the main page was named Featured Dragon rather than Random Dragon. Featured usually means a select few of the whole, not a random one and omitting a select few.

Most wikias use the  parser function for this functionality, similar to WoWWiki, to only show a handful of the full list of 180 that are featured.

452 was right in his replies in that if this is not what you want, DPL is probably needed.

As mentioned, DPL can include a snippet of information with the DPL call via the include parameter. However, this doesn't have to be just from within a template you specify. This can be from text already on the page (the intro paragraph/description) as well. This means you could effectively recall any section of the article.

Also, as mentioned, with nottitlematch, you can choose to not match a specific pagename (or 2 or 10) in the DPL call.

Where you go from here really depends on the need. If the intention really is to pick a randomly chosen dragon out of the 180ish and display text, you'd need DPL. However, I'd encourage you to instead use the  functionality. This has more benefits than DPL does.


 * 1) DPL caches results. True, you can force nocache, but that slows the page load for every user every time they load the page because that DPL call needs to be re-run again and again.
 * 2) * Choose also caches results, but the run time is much faster as it's generating it from text within the template, not pulling up a list of every page of the 180 in the category before picking one before loading that page before grabbing the info you want to display.
 * 3) Choose is expandable easily by editing the template and the text displayed doesn't need to exist anywhere else on the site. This means you can perfectly tailor the description shown without changing/editing the pages themselves.
 * 4) DPL is confusing when you start using multiple parameters and format options. Choose is wikitext and will display how it displays within the template.

Both have their pros and cons. Ease of use: Choose. More control: DPL.

You can read more on DPL here and more on Choose here.