In another blog, I could tag a post with arbitrary words and not have to do anything else for the software to recognize it as a tag. In Ikiwiki if you want to tag something [[!tag foo]] you also have to go to tags/ and create foo.mkdn (even if it's zero-length), because "tags are links", and links don't actually link if they have no destination. This allows for customization of how you present different tag feeds, but this (to me) is too much work and more like a category than a tag. It'd be nice if you could tell the tag plugin "if the tag target doesn't exist in tags/*, pretend it does exist and is zero-length". -- Larry Clapp

Never mind, I think I found the answer (or at least a pointer) here. Feel free to delete both these comments :). -- Larry Clapp

Why do you have to go create the tag? A tag (or link) pointing at a page that doesn't exist does still exist. ikiwiki allows you to:

  • Create a pagespec to match pages linking to the "nonexistant" tag.
  • Click on the tag to create the tag page, like any other incomplete link. --Joey