Help:DPL

There is no portrait of DPL, so once again, Adriana Lima fills the void.

DPL or Dynamic Parameter List is a way to grab other pages, pieces of pages, or references to pages, and put a list of them in the page you are writing.

There is a variety of DPL implementations, all of them claiming compatibility with the others, with a supple list of cases where they aren't. Such as a temporary sudden inability to sort entries in the Uncyclopedia Hall of Shame numerically by number of features (now corrected).

At the time of this writing, Uncyclopedia uses DynamicPageList3 version 3.3.4. You can verify at Special:Version which DPL version Uncyclopedia uses at the time of this reading.

Essence

In Uncyclopedia, DPL code is contained in the template-like code: {{#dpl:...}} Also like a template, individual commands to DPL (including the first) are separated by the pipe or vertical-bar character.

DPL code can also be bracketed by <DPL> before and </DPL> after.

The two best ways to compose DPL are:

• Find a page that uses DPL and steal the code. (Copy, actually, don't just take it and leave nothing.) You can find these pages as they are all automatically added to the hidden category Category:Pages using DynamicPageList parser function. (Hidden means you usually don't see this category at the bottom of the page.)
• Do actual research, from the sources listed below

Example

Christmas 2022

• 25 Dec 22 — FTX crooks and prosecutors exchange lies
• 24 Dec 22 — Aussie shopper gets Playstation 5 for free
• 15 Dec 22 — Ukraine bans bad Christmas music
• 06 Dec 22 — Santa to join Christmas strike action
• 03 Dec 22 — San Francisco police get RoboCop for Christmas
• 30 Nov 22 — Christmas workers report a spike in back problems

Suppose you wanted your article to include a list of UnNews articles written about Christmas 2022. Instead of creating a one-off Category:Christmas 2022 and dictating that all contributors tag their UnNews stories with it, you write DPL to search the website for all pages:

• In Category:UnNews
• In Category:Christmas
• Written within calendar 2022
• Not in certain categories that suggest that it isn't worthy of listing.

As shown, you can add the article's date, sort chronologically or in a lot of other ways, and format it to your liking. Other effects, such as the green box, the scroll bar, and the instruction for the graphic to float at the left margin, are not coded in DPL but by the enclosing divisions using HTML <DIV> tags. Click on Edit to see this page's code that produced these effects.

Usage note

DPL is pretty efficient when you tell it to work within one or more categories. When a particularly clever concept results in an unclever implementation — such as a DPL search that requires DPL to open and read each of Uncyclopedia's 30,000-plus pages — it is slow as molasses.

See also

There are dozens of DPL parameters that specify what pages to select, what pages to exclude, how to sort them, and how to display them. For example, you can search using a Regular Expression (regex) and specify the desired format of dates.

• mw:DPL is the Help page on MediaWiki (the website of the creators of the software Uncyclopedia uses)
• This Help page points you to a manual at Wikia that explains each DPL parameter. (Imagine? Looking to Wikia for help?)