-For one type of plugin, see [[todo/PluggableRenderers]].
+Suggestions of ideas for plugins:
-A plugin system should ideally support things like:
-
-* [[todo/lists]] of pages, of mising pages / broken links, of registered users, etc
-* a [[todo/link_map]]
-* [[todo/sigs]]
+* 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?
+* a [[link_map]]
+* [[sigs]] ?
* [[pageindexes]]
-* Wiki stats, such as the total number of pages, total number of links, most linked to pages, etc, etc.
-* wiki info page, giving the ikiwiki version etc
-* would it be useful to reimplement the hyperestradier search integration as a plugin?
-* Support [[RecentChanges]] as a regular page containing a plugin that updates each time there is a change, and statically builds the recent changes list. (Would this be too expensive/inflexible? There might be other ways to do it as a plugin, like making all links to RecentChanges link to the cgi and have the cgi render it on demand.)
-* etc
-
-Another, separate plugin system that already (mostly) exists in ikiwiki is the RCS backend, which allows writing modules to drive other RCS systems than subversion.
-
-## preprocessor plugins
+* Wiki stats, such as total number of links, most linked to pages
-Considering ikiwiki plugins, one idea I have is to make the [[PreProcessorDirective]]s be a plugin. A setting in the config file would enable various plusins, which are perl modules, that each provide one or more preprocessor directives.
+* Support [[RecentChanges]] as a regular page containing a plugin that
+ updates each time there is a change, and statically builds the recent
+ changes list. (Would this be too expensive/inflexible? There might be
+ other ways to do it as a plugin, like making all links to RecentChanges
+ link to the cgi and have the cgi render it on demand.)
-Since preprocessing happens before htmlization but after a page is loaded and linkified, it should be possible to use it to create something like a link map or lists, or a page index. Page inlining and rss generation is already done via preprocessor directives and seems a natureal as a plugin too.
+ Or using an iframe
+ to inline the cgi, although firefox seems to render that nastily with
+ nested scroll bars. :-(
-Note that things like a link map or a broken link list page would need to be updated whenever a set (or all) pages change; the %inlinepages hash already allows for pages to register this, although it might need to be renamed.
+* 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]]
-I need to look at the full range of things that other wikis use their plugin systems for, but preprocessor directives as plugins certianly seems useful, even if it's not a complete solution.
+* interwiki links
-## case study: Moin Moin plugins
+* random page (cgi plugin; how to link to it easily?)
-See <http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MoinDev/PluginConcept>
+* navigation or side bar plugin, would use a specific page as the side bar
+ and include it into the other pages as specified by the template. The
+ pagetemplate hook was added to allow for this.
-6 different types of plugins:
+All the kinds of plugins that blogging software has is also a possibility:
-* *actions* are possibly out of scope for ikiwiki, this is probably what it uses for cgi script type stuff. Unless ikiwiki wants to allow pluggable CGI script stuff, it doesn't need these.
-* *parsers* and *formatters* are basically what I've been calling [[PluggableRenderers]]. MoinMoin separates these, so that a page is parsed to (presumbly) some intermediate form before being output as html or some other form. That's a nice separation, but what to do about things like markdown that are both a parser and a formatter?
-* *macros* and *processors* are analagous to preprocessor directives. A processor can operate on a large block of text though.
-* *themes* should be irrellevant (ikiwiki has [[templates]]).
+* Blog post calendar
+* technocrati pinger
+* Tag stuff?