@frogabog - your note did send me off to learn about that interesting feature, so it wasn't a waste.
@BobRay - it is looking like showtv is a subset of setPlaceholders. Since I'm just starting, I'm inclined toward the all-in-one option at the moment, unless there's more in there that I can't see?
@jgrant - thanks for that clarification. It looks like you've handled everything.
<OT soapbox>
While I understand what you're saying about IDs versus an Alias, I must strongly disagree. If a new page assumes responsibility for an old one (same alias) every element in the CMS needs to change. That's bad. I never use real or meaningful IDs in an application. Examples include phone numbers, USA Social Security Numbers, Driver's license IDs, First or Last Name, Product ID, etc. Those are fields within a database record and should not be IDs. As soon as someone determines that some ID is going to be carved in stone (and hard-coded into pages), it's going to change. Either the application will need a huge change, or database references will need to be zapped - even in a CMS. A reference like [[~123]] should point to the essence of what we want to say, not the physical location of where it's stored. Since only one resource can be active for any given alias (?) it only seems reasonable that a utility which references [[~alias]] should go to the one and only active resource for that alias, and from there we can derive the ~id.
I'll qualify all of that with "this is my experience over the last 30 years though it may not apply to this specific environment, and I'm sure I will get better educated over time here".

Unless there is already a snippet for this, I'm inclined to write one that uses an alias to lookup the first available active resource and then retrieve its ID, rather than ever using [[~123]]. I know there are already other snippets that retrieve the ID for different reasons but this one function seems important to me at the moment.
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Thanks all.