I would like to allow comments on ikiwiki pages without CGI. I have in mind something like

• Use a pagetemplate hook
  in a plugin (DONE)
• add a mailto: url to each page matching some pagespec (currently every page gets a comment footer)

• this mailto url goes to an address identifying the page (something like user-iki-blog~I_hate_markdown@host.fqdn.tld). (DONE) more details

• on the mail receiving end, these messages are either deleted, or ran through a filter to be turned into blog posts. As a first step, I have written a filter that decodes the address and writes the message into an appropriate mailbox. I would be interested in any ideas people have about security.

• the same plugin can check for comments on a particular page next time the wiki is generated, and add a link. (more or less done)

  If the filter just checks in the posts into revision control, the post-commit hook would handle updating the wiki to include those posts as they come in. --Joey

• work in progress can be

  • cloned, or
  • browsed

Any comments? Write them here or send them to DavidBremner

I don't want to derail this with too much blue-skying, but I was thinking earlier that it would be nice if ikiwiki could do something sensible with mailbox files, such as turning them into a (threaded?) blog display.

One reason I was thinking about that was just that it would be nice to be able to use ikiwiki for mailing list archives. But another reason was that it would be nice to solve the problem described in discussion page as blog. For that you really want a threaded system, and mailbox file formats already have threading.

If that were done, it would tie into what you're working on in an interesting way, since the incoming mail would only need to be committed to the appropriate mailbox file, with ikiwiki then running to process it. --Joey

It is an interesting idea. I like that it uses an arbitrary MUA as a "moderation" interface. After I killed a debian BTS entry with clumsy pseudoheader editing I think any reference info should also be encoded into the address.

The current version of this plugin is now running on my home page. See for example a recent post in my blog.
Unfortunately although the mailbox renderer supports threading, I haven't had a chance to implement comments on comments yet. DavidBremner