External plugins are standalone, executable programs, that can be written
in any language. When ikiwiki starts up, it runs the program, and
-communicates with it using XML RPC. If you want to [[write]] an external
+communicates with it using [XML RPC][xmlrpc]. If you want to [[write]] an external
plugin, read on..
+[xmlrpc]: http://www.xmlrpc.com/
+
ikiwiki contains one sample external plugin, named `externaldemo`. This is
written in perl, but is intended to be an example of how to write an
external plugin in your favorite programming language. Wow us at how much
stored state, call `getstate("page", "id", "key")`, and to store state,
call `setstate("page", "id", "key", "value")`.
+To access ikiwiki's ARGV array, call `getargv()`. To change its ARGV, call
+`setargv(array)`.
+
## Notes on function parameters
The [[plugin_interface_documentation|write]] talks about functions that take
to convert these named parameters into something more natural for the
language as part of their XML RPC interface.
+## undef
+
+XML RPC has a limitation that it does not have a way to pass
+undef/NULL/None. There is an extension to the protocol that supports this,
+but it is not yet available in the [[cpan XML::RPC]] library used by
+ikiwiki.
+
+Until the extension is available, ikiwiki allows undef to be communicated
+over XML RPC by passing a sentinal value, a hash with a single key "null"
+with a value of an empty string. External plugins that need to communicate
+null values to or from ikiwiki will have to translate between undef and
+the sentinal.
+
## Function injection
Some parts of ikiwiki are extensible by adding functions. For example, the
FormBuilder perl objects), or use it to call `template()` (which returns a
perl HTML::Template object).
-Also. the `getopt` hook doesn't work, as ARGV is not available to the external
-plugin.
-
## Performance issues
Since each external plugin is a separate process, when ikiwiki is