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Having tried out field, some comments (from [[smcv]]):

The general concept looks great.

The pagetemplate hook seems quite namespace-polluting: on a site containing a list of books, I'd like to have an author field, but that would collide with IkiWiki's use of <TMPL_VAR AUTHOR> for the author of the page (i.e. me). Perhaps it'd be better if the pagetemplate hook was only active for <TMPL_VAR FIELD_AUTHOR> or something? (For those who want the current behaviour, an auxiliary plugin would be easy.)

No, please. The idea is to be able to override field names if one wishes to, and choose, for yourself, non-colliding field names if one wishes not to. I don't wish to lose the power of being able to, say, define a page title with YAML format if I want to, or to write a site-specific plugin which calculates a page title, or other nifty things. It's not like one is going to lose the fields defined by the meta plugin; if "author" is defined by [[!meta author=...]] then that's what will be found by "field" (provided the "meta" plugin is registered; that's what the "field_register" option is for). --[[KathrynAndersen]]

Hmm. I suppose if you put the title (or whatever) in the YAML, then "almost" all the places in IkiWiki that respect titles will do the right thing due to the pagetemplate hook, with the exception being anything that has special side-effects inside meta (like date), or anything that looks in $pagestate{foo}{meta} directly (like map). Is your plan that meta should register itself by default, and map and friends should be adapted to work based on getfield() instead of $pagestate{foo}{meta}, then?

(On the site I mentioned, I'm using an unmodified version of field, and currently working around the collision by tagging books' pages with bookauthor instead of author in the YAML.) --s

From a coding style point of view, the $CamelCase variable names aren't IkiWiki style, and the match_foo functions look as though they could benefit from being thin wrappers around a common &IkiWiki::Plugin::field::match function (see meta for a similar approach).

I think the documentation would probably be clearer in a less manpage-like and more ikiwiki-like style?

I don't think ikiwiki has a "style" for docs, does it? So I followed the Perl Module style. And I'm rather baffled as to why having the docs laid out in clear sections... make them less clear. --[[KathrynAndersen]]

I keep getting distracted by the big shouty headings :-) I suppose what I was really getting at was that when this plugin is merged, its docs will end up split between its plugin page, [[plugins/write]] and [[ikiwiki/PageSpec]]; on some of the contrib plugins I've added I've tried to separate the docs according to how they'll hopefully be laid out after merge. --s

If one of my branches from [[todo/allow_plugins_to_add_sorting_methods]] is accepted, a field() cmp type would mean that [[plugins/contrib/report]] can stop reimplementing sorting. Here's the implementation I'm using, with your "sortspec" concept (a sort-hook would be very similar): if merged, I think it should just be part of field rather than a separate plugin.

# Copyright © 2010 Simon McVittie, released under GNU GPL >= 2
package IkiWiki::Plugin::fieldsort;
use warnings;
use strict;
use IkiWiki 3.00;
use IkiWiki::Plugin::field;

sub import {
	hook(type => "getsetup", id => "fieldsort",  call => \&getsetup);
}

sub getsetup () {
	return
		plugin => {
			safe => 1,
			rebuild => undef,
		},
}

package IkiWiki::SortSpec;

sub cmp_field {
	if (!length $_[0]) {
		error("sort=field requires a parameter");
	}

	my $left = IkiWiki::Plugin::field::field_get_value($_[2], $_[0]);
	my $right = IkiWiki::Plugin::field::field_get_value($_[2], $_[1]);

	$left = "" unless defined $left;
	$right = "" unless defined $right;
	return $left cmp $right;
}

1;