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).

Since this todo was opened, the 404 plugin has been added; it does exactly that. Only if you have Apache, at the moment, though. --smcv

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 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