Perhaps I'm just too stupid to find the proper way to do this, but how
would I add a new page to the wiki without selecting to edit an already
installed one and frobbing the URL to direct to the to-be-created page?
--[[ThomasSchwinge]]

Good point. Of course one way is to start with creating a link to the page,
which also helps prevent orphans. But other wikis based on CGI do have this
a bit easier, since they can detect an attempt to access a nonexistant page
and show an edit page. Ikiwiki can't do that (unless its web server is
configured to do smart things on a 404, like maybe call ikiwiki.cgi which
could be modified to work as a smart 404 -> edit handler).

Some wikis also provide a UI means for creating a new page. If we can find
something good, that can be added to ikiwiki's UI. --[[Joey]]

Hmm, maybe just a preprocessor directive that creates a form inside a page,
like is used for blog posting already would suffice? Then the main page of
a wiki could have a form for adding new pages, if that directive were
included there. Won't work for subpages though, unless the directive were
added to the parent page. However, unconnected subpages are surely an even
rarer thing to want than unconnected top level pages. --[[Joey]]

> Here is a simple plugin that does that. Perhaps options could be added to
> it, but I couldn't really think of any.
> <http://jameswestby.net/scratch/create.diff>
> -- JamesWestby

> For what it's worth, the following works:  
> `\[[!inline pages=!* rss=no atom=no postform=yes postformtext="Add a new page titled:"]]`  
> Add `rootpage=/` if you do this in `index.mdwn` to avoid creating subpages.
> --[[JeremieKoenig]]


Maybe a very simple PHP frontend for serving the
statically generated pages, that would display a page editing form or
something like that for non-existent pages, wouldn't be too bad a thing
and resource hog? Just a thought... --[[Tuomov]]

----

A quick round-up of how other wikis address this problem:

 * mediawiki *used* to Offer a search box with two buttons: 'Go'
   and 'Search'.  'Go' brought you to a page with the name you
   typed if it exists, and searches otherwise.  In the latter case,
   you get a link like this at the top of the search results:

> There is no page titled "Testing". You can create this page.

 * wikia mediawikis have an "add a page" button that pops-up a JS
   pseudo-window asking for a page name. On submission, you end
   up at an edit window for the page.

 * wikipedia now makes it quite hard to create new pages. The old
   'go' button is gone, nearly all search terms end up at an actual
   article, a "no results" match does not have helpful create link
   options.

 * Moin Moin has a two-button search: "Titles" and "Text".  Neither
   offer a "create page" option for 0-match searches.

 * the original c2.com wiki has no helpful link for this either.

So - the direction of travel would appear to be *away* from having
"new page" functionality.

I would suggest the following for ikiwiki:

 * Extend the search results page to include a "create this page" link,
   perhaps toggleable, perhaps only if the search term matches some
   criteria for what makes a sensible page name

 * Some combination of JamesWestby's "create" plugin, extracting the
   current stuff inside [[ikiwiki/plugins/inline]] (see also:
   [[more flexible inline postform]]) -- more generally, rationalising
   where that code lives so it can be used in more contexts.

 * documenting the `inline` hack above (which I use extensively on my
   private wikis, by the way!) as a [[tip]].

-- [[Jon]]