Well if you are in the good habbit of creating _templates already, wich allows you to easely manage your site if it becomes bigger (I am writing this for people who are not in that habbit and who need to investigate on _templates). You can now go a step further. You can create _templates with a form definition, wich allows contributors to add content in a more user friendly way (check out DATAFORMS).

Now if you would make a _template for lets say a newletter. You could imagen that the following fields exist: Title, summary, full text, author. There are two ways to manipulate the layout that is stored in this page (lets call it newsletter:1, based on newsletter:_template)

• First way is to define a layout in the _template (newsletter:_template) wich is the normal way of doing things on wikidot. You define the layout in the template above the "====".
• The second way you can manipulate or define the way in wich this content is displayed is by using a [[module listpages...]]. Here you can in the body also create a layout according to your needs or suited for the medium on wich you want to display it.

However when using a ListPages module, you can not easely select just one page… you need to tag all your pages with a unique tag if you want for example to select your page using the tags-selector. Wich is APITA (A Pain In The A**)

So the information of your newsletter is stored in newsletter:1 but you could make a second "_template" in a different page (if you could select only one page(wich is my wish)), and make a different layout for this "_template". For example pda-newsletter:1. Since the name of this page is well choosen (the same as the original (1), you could get the content of newsletter:1 by selecting this page in your ListPages module page="newsletter:%%name%%" and create a layout without for example the full text of the article, but only the summary… or no pictures or…

I hope this makes my wish clearer Leiger

Indeed… and use wikidot-pages (created with dataforms) as records of a database where the category is the name of the table… so retrieving the "1ste" record of table "newsletter" can be done on anypage by the syntax

[[module listpages page="newsletter:1"]]
+ %%form_data{title}%%
%%form_data{summary}%%
[[/module]]

Yes in this case "listpages" is not so fortunate… but… wikidot may call it whatever as long as this can be possible
[[include...]] would be a good (better) option.
But the ListPages module is closer in development stage… this only needs a new selector.

I suggested a couple of alternatives for [[include]] here: http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-241359/improving-the-usability-of-data-forms

Another possibility would be:

[[include formatting-page
    |var-1=value-1 
    |database-page 
    |var-n=value-n ]]

Implementation:
If the variable definition does not contain "=", then try to read a page with the same name and assign variable names from that.

Nice alternative, however in the "keep it simple"-philosphy I would give all variables a name, a logical operator and a value : "page=pagename". And simple means in this context easy to figure out how it works and easy to reproduce without extensive knowledge, not having to type less :-)

We could have a parameter "With=<database-page>" for include, and that is my second alternative on the post I linked to earlier. But that would be the first parameter that [[include]] would take; it does not have any at the moment, and I think its parsing must be different to a [[module]] block which does take such parameters. My suggestion above is in line with the existing parsing of [[include]] and should therefore be possible at least as easily as the ListPages extension.

The same as my wish http://feedback.wikidot.com/wish:766 ListPages select ONE page by ONE "fullname" - which would free us from the tagging of a page with it's own pagename!

PLease - rate this up!
We need it so often and would not have the neccessity to tag all pages with their own name!