Wishlist items such as Add space before slash in parent links would be easier to deal with if the page.tmpl template was broken up into sections and each section had a separate template file which was included in the master page.tmpl file. This would make it easier to customize parts of a page without having to fork the whole page.tmpl and then have things break when there's an update of the master page.tmpl file.
Suggested sections:
- page_head.tmpl for the things in the section
- page_header.tmpl for things in the "header" div (which includes the PARENTLINKS loop)
- page_actions.tmpl for the actions section
- page_sidebar.tmpl for the sidebar
- page_content.tmpl for the main content
- page_footer.tmpl for the footer
Would this work, or would HTML::Template have problems with this?
Well, breaking it up into 6 sections would let a user modify one of them with only 1/6th the chance of it being broken by a new ikiwiki. Which seems like a win from the user's POV. However, I know that there are ikiwiki users who modify the
page.tmplbut are very unsophisticated; needing to find the right file amoung 6 to modify would be a loss for these users. And some modifications would probably need to be coordinated amoung multiple files.For ikiwiki developers, reducing by 5/6th the number of users affected by a breaking change to page.tmpl is nice, but we still have to worry about the 1 in 6 that would be affected despite the splitting. Ikiwiki has enough users that any change to page.tmpl has to be carefully considered to avoid breaking something they may depend on, and it's been two years since that last needed to be done.
So all in all, I don't think it's worth doing. --Joey