doc/bugs/cgi_does_not_use_templatedir_overlay.mdwn



I have set
 templatedir => "/srv/apache2/madduck.net/templates",

in ikiwiki.setup and put a custom page.tmpl in there, then called ikiwiki --setup and verified that it works. It even works when I push to the Git repo and let the receive-hook update the wiki.
However, when I make a change via the CGI (which has been created by the last setup run), it applies the default page.tmpl file to all pages it updates.

This issue can arise in at least two ways:

A permissions problem with the templatedir that prevents ikiwiki from
accessing it. If it can't access it, it silently falls back to using
templates from the default directory.
A templatedir that doesn't have an absolute path. In this case ikiwiki
will look relative to somewhere, which will sometimes work and
sometimes not. Clearly not a good idea.

So far that's the only ways that I can see that this could happen.
It would be possible to make ikiwiki try to detect these sorts of
problems; it could check if the templatedir exists, and check that it's
readable. This would add some extra system calls to every ikiwiki run,
and I'm not convinced it's worth it. --[[Joey]]