This is another blogging support thing, and it relies on
[[pagespec_relative_to_a_target]] (but only to figure out whether a given page
has a child). Basically, you give it a page called missingparents.mdwn,
something like this:
And it scans the whole wiki for pages that match the pagespecs but are missing
parents. If any are found, they are generated automatically using the text in
the "generate" parameter (except $page is substituted for the page title).
These generated pages aren't kept in version control, but of course they're
ordinary wiki pages and can be edited by the web form or otherwise added, at
which point the missingparents plugin lets go of them. (TODO: CGI.pm needs to
know to rcs_add these pages if they are edited, and it doesn't.) If all of the
children of a missingparent page goes away, the missingparent itself is
unlinked automatically, and all missingparents are deleted on wiki rebuild.
To implement this, I needed to tell ikiwiki that pages were being added and
removed in a non-standard way, and so created functions newpage and delpage
in the IkiWiki namespace to do these things. delpage is modeled on the
Render.pm code that deletes pages, so I re-used it in Render.pm. I also
needed a way to add files to be deleted on a refresh(), so I added a
needsdelete hook, parallel in form to needsbuild.
This patch, or one like it, would enable better blogging support, by adding
the ability to hierarchically organize blog posts and automatically generate
structural pages for year, month, or day. Please apply. --Ethan
