doc/todo/plugin.mdwn



Suggestions of ideas for plugins:


enable editable, non-htmlized files
Some months ago, before upgrading my wiki, I used svn to check in an XML file
and a companion XSL file for client-side styling. That was cool, ikiwiki
copied them over unchanged and the file could be linked to as \[[foo|foo.xml]].
I even had the XSL produce an Edit link at the top, because I wanted a simple
way for a web user to edit the XML. But I had to hack stuff to make the edit CGI
not say foo.xml is not an editable page.
I did that in a kind of slash-and-burn way, and apparently that's the one change
that was uncommitted when I upgraded ikiwiki, so now it's in the same place
as the wikiwyg project. On the bright side, that's a chance to think about how to
do it better.
Any suggestions for appropriate uses of existing plugins, or the plugin API,
to selectively add to the set of files in the working copy that the edit CGI
will consider editable? --ChapmanFlack 17July2008

It looks like 80% of the job would be accomplished by hooking htmlize for
the .xml extension. That would satisfy the pagetype test that causes
the edit CGI to say not an editable page. (That happens too early for a
canedit hook.) The htmlize hook could just
copy in to out unchanged (this is an internal wiki, I'm not thinking hard
about evil XML content right now). For extra credit, an editcontent hook
could validate the XML. (Can an editcontent hook signal a content error?)


The tricky bit seems to be to register the fact that the target file should
have extension .xml and not .html.  Maybe what's needed is a generalized
notion of an htmlize hook, one that specifies its output extension as well
as its input, and isn't assumed to produce html? --ChapmanFlack 17July2008


Belay that, there's nothing good about trying to use htmlize for this; too
many html-specific assumptions follow. For now I'm back to an embarrassing quick
hack that allows editing my xml file.  But here's the larger generalization I
think this is driving at:


IkiWiki is currently a tool that can compile a wiki by doing two things:

Process files of various input types foo into a single output type, html, by
finding suitable foo->html plugins, applying various useful transformations
along the way.
Process files of other input types by copying them with no useful transformations at all.


What it could be: a tool that compiles a wiki by doing this:

Process files of various input types foo into various output types bar, by
finding suitable foo->bar plugins, applying various useful transformations along
the way, but only those that apply to the foo->bar conversion.
The second case above is now just a special case of 1 where foo->foo for any
unknown foo is just a copy, and no other transformations apply.


In some ways this seems like an easy and natural generalization. %renderedfiles
is already mostly there, keeping the actual names of rendered files without assuming
an html extension. There isn't a mechanism yet to say which transformations for
linkification, preprocessing, etc., apply to which in/out types, but it could be
easily added without a flag day. Right now, they all apply to any input type for
which an htmlize hook exists, and none otherwise. That rule could be retained
with an optional hook parameter available to override it.


The hard part is just that right now the assumption of html as the one destination
type is in the code a lot. --ChapmanFlack


list of registered users - tricky because it sorta calls for a way to rebuild the page when a new user is registered. Might be better as a cgi?


At best, this could only show the users who have logged in, not all
permitted by the current auth plugin(s).  HTTP auth would need
web-server-specific code to list all users, and openid can't feasibly do so
at all. --[[JoshTriplett]]


It would be nice to be able to have a button to show "Differences" (or
"Show Diff") when editing a page. Is that an option that can be enabled?
Using a plugin?


For PlaceWiki I want to be able to do some custom plugins, including one
that links together subpages about the same place created by different
users. This seems to call for a plugin that applies to every page w/o any
specific marker being used, and pre-or-post-processes the full page
content. It also needs to update pages when related pages are added,
so it needs to register dependencies pre-emptively between pages,
or something. It's possible that this is a special case of backlinks and
is best implemented by making backlinks a plugin somehow. --[[Joey]]


random page (cgi plugin; how to link to it easily?)


How about an event calendar. Events could be sub-pages with an embedded
code to detail recurrance and/or event date/time


rcs plugin ([[JeremyReed]] has one he has been using for over a month with over 850 web commits with 13 users with over ten commits each.)


asciidoc or txt2tags format plugins
Should be quite easy to write, the otl plugin is a good example of a
similar formatter.


Isn't there a conflict between ikiwiki using [[  ]] and asciidoc using the same?
There is a start of an asciidoc plugin at http://www.mail-archive.com/asciidoc-discuss@metaperl.com/msg00120.html
-- KarlMW


manpage plugin: convert "ls(1)" style content into Markdown like [ls(1)](http://example.org/man.cgi?name=ls&sect=1) or into HTML directly.


With a full installation of groff available, man offers HTML output.  Might
take some fiddling to make it fit into the ikiwiki templates, and you might
or might not want to convert pages in the SEE ALSO as
well. --[[JoshTriplett]]


As I couldn't find another place to ask, I'll try here. I would like to install some contributed plugins, but can not find anywhere to downlod them.

Not sure what you mean, the [[plugins/contrib]] page lists contributed plugins, and each of their pages tells where to download the plugin from.. --[[Joey]]


I wrote a very crude wrapper around tex4ht to render TeX files.  I hesitate to give it a contrib/plugins page in its current state, but if someone wants to play, here it is.--[[DavidBremner]]


Setting default values for the meta plugin in the setup file, particularly author, license, and copyright, would be useful
There is work in progress at
[[plugins/contrib/default_content_for___42__copyright__42___and___42__license__42__]]
-- [[DavidBremner]]


Would it make sense to have a hook to set the page name?  This would solve a problem I see with
[[source_code_highlighting|plugins/contrib/sourcehighlight]]
-- [[DavidBremner]]