improve support for internal pages

This makes it a lot quicker to deal with lots of recentchanges pages
appearing and disappearing. It avoids needing to clutter up pagespecs with
exclusions for those pages, by making normal pagespecs not match them.

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 5 deletions

diff --git a/doc/plugins/write.mdwn b/doc/plugins/write.mdwn
index 9e27cc27f..4de7e434d 100644
--- a/doc/plugins/write.mdwn
+++ b/doc/plugins/write.mdwn
@@ -151,11 +151,6 @@ specifies the filename extension that a file must have to be htmlized using
 this plugin. This is how you can add support for new and exciting markup
 languages to ikiwiki.
 
-Note that if you choose a filename extension that starts with "_",
-ikiwiki will not render the page, or allow the page to be edited with the
-web interface. This is useful for certian types of internal-use pages, but
-should generally be avoided.
-
 The function is passed named parameters: "page" and "content" and should
 return the htmlized content.
 
@@ -536,6 +531,19 @@ destination file, as registered by `will_render`.
 Passed a page and an extension, returns the filename that page will be
 rendered to.
 
+## Internal use pages
+
+Sometimes it's useful to put pages in the wiki without having them be
+rendered to individual html files. Such internal use pages are collected
+together to form the RecentChanges page, for example.
+
+To make an internal use page, register a filename extension that starts
+with "_". Internal use pages cannot be edited with the web interface, are
+not scanned for wikilinks (though wikilinks and preprocessor directives can
+still appear on them, this is rarely a good idea), and are not matched by
+regular PageSpecs glob patterns, but instead only by a special `internal()`
+[[ikiwiki/PageSpec]].
+
 ## RCS plugins
 
 ikiwiki's support for [[revision_control_systems|rcs]] also uses pluggable