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If page.tmpl is changed, it would be nice if ikiwiki automatically noticed, and rebuilt all pages. If inlinepage.tmpl is changed, a rebuild of all pages using it in an inline would be stellar.

This would allow setting:

templatedir => "$srcdir/templates",

.. and then the [[wikitemplates]] are managed like other wiki files; and like other wiki files, a change to them automatically updates dependent pages.

Originally, it made good sense not to have the templatedir inside the wiki. Those templates can be used to bypass the htmlscrubber, and you don't want just anyone to edit them. But the same can be said of style.css and ikiwiki.js, which are in the wiki. We rely on allowed_attachments being set to secure those to prevent users uploading replacements. And we assume that users who can directly (non-anon) commit can edit them, and that's ok.

So, perhaps the easiest way to solve this [[wishlist]] would be to make templatedir default to "$srcdir/templates/, and make ikiwiki register dependencies on page.tmpl, inlinepage.tmpl, etc, as they're used. Although, having every page declare an explicit dep on page.tmpl is perhaps a bit much; might be better to implement a special case for that one. Also, having the templates be copied to destdir is not desirable. In a sense, these template would be like internal pages, except not wiki pages, but raw files.

The risk is that a site might have allowed_attachments set to templates/* or *.tmpl something like that. I think such a configuration is the only risk, and it's unlikely enough that a NEWS warning should suffice.

(This would also help to clear up the tricky disctinction between wikitemplates and in-wiki templates.)

Note also that when using templates from "$srcdir/templates/", no_includes needs to be set. Currently this is done by the two plugins that use such templates, while includes are allowed in templatedir.

Have started working on this. [[!template id=gitbranch branch=origin/templatemove author="[[Joey]]"]]

But would this require that templates be parseable as wiki pages? Because that would be a nuisance. --[[KathrynAndersen]]

It would be better for them not to be rendered separately at all. --[[Joey]]

I don't follow you. --[[KathrynAndersen]]

If they don't render to output files, they clearly don't need to be treated as wiki pages. (They need to be treated as raw files anyway, because you don't want random users editing them in the online editor.) --[[Joey]]

Just to be clear, the raw files would not be copied across to the output directory? -- [[Jon]]

Without modifying ikiwiki, they'd be copied to the output directory as (e.g.) http://ikiwiki.info/templates/inlinepage.tmpl; to not copy them, it'd either be necessary to make them be internal pages (templates/inlinepage._tmpl) or special-case them in some other way. --[[smcv]]

In my branch, I left in support for the templatedir, and also /usr/share/ikiwiki/templates. So, users do not have to put their custom templates in templates/ in the wiki. If they do, the templates are copied to the destdir like other non-wiki page files are. The templates are not wiki pages, except those used by a few things like the [[plugins/template]] plugin.

That seems acceptable, since users probably don't need to modify many templates, so the clutter is small. (Especially when compared to the other clutter the basewiki always puts in destdir.) This could be revisted later. --[[Joey]]