Inserting random pieces of text or images

You may want to insert random pieces of text, or even random images in your pages. That's quite easy.

First create a new message in your site, that you'll use as a container. Put in the body of this message the pieces of text or the image tags you want to insert randomly. Each one must be on its own line, and you shouldn't have empty lines. In other words, the delimiter is the carriage return, and everything between two carriage returns is a field.

Then, in your template or in the body of another message, put the following simple macro call:

<!--#randomizer(N)-->

In this macro call, N is the number of your container message. At each rendering, this macro call will be replaced with a field randomly chosen in the message N.

Of couse, you may have several different container messages. And you can also call the same macro, pointing to the same container, several times in a page or in a template. You'll never get the same field twice in the page.

Do you wonder what would happen if you call the macro four times with three fields in your container message? In this case, one of the macro calls would be replaced with an empty string.