I use a default template for all new pages:

[[!meta  title="<TMPL_VAR name>"]]
[[!meta  author=]]
[[!meta  date="<TMPL_VAR time>"]]
[[!meta  guid="urn:uuid:<TMPL_VAR uuid>"]]
[[!tag  ]]

This encourages me to include useful metadata on the page. In particular, though, I've modified the edittemplate plugin to generate a uuid for use in the guid, for use in inline. Importantly, this keeps inline from flooding aggregators when I rename these pages.

I've also noticed that IkiWiki seems to use the creation time for the generated page for the page date. This means that when I do a rebuild, inlined pages get shuffled. The inclusion of a time variable in edittemplate (and in a meta declaration for all such pages) prevents the date from changing unexpectedly.

I've already made these changes in my installation, and have made my patches available in the edittemplate branch of git://civilfritz.net/ikiwiki.git.

Changes to the structure of $pagestate{$registering_page}{edittemplate}{$pagespec} mean that a cgi rebuild is necessary (for reasons I don't entirely understand); but I think that's preferable to creating an entirely separate $pagestate namespace for storing parameters. That said, I'm not really a perl programmer, so corrections are welcome.

I like this patch. I hate seeing things I've already read get marked as unread in my rss feed. -- JoshBBall

(I don't have commit access so take this with a pinch of salt - I'm just trying to help deal with the code-review backlog.)

I mostly like the first and third patches in the branch (adding v4 (random) UUIDs, and adding the timestamps). I'd be tempted to rename time and formatted_time to iso_time and time, but that's a matter of taste, and perhaps people with commit access have stronger opinions one way or another. I haven't researched whether there's precendent for any particular naming style elsewhere in ikiwiki.

The UUID bit would require adding some reference to libuuid-tiny-perl to the Debian packaging - I think a Recommends is too strong but a Suggests seems OK.

I don't like the second patch (adding URL-namespaced UUID support). I'm having a hard time thinking of any situation in which a v4 UUID would be unsuitable, which means it's unnecessary complexity. FYI, the reason that it makes a rebuild is necessary is that you've restructured $pagestate, which is carried over from one refresh to the next (that's its purpose), and you haven't built in any migration or backwards-compatibility code that will cope with it being in the old format. My inclination would be to drop that patch. If there's a really good reason to prefer v3/v5 UUIDs, please describe it and I'll try to suggest some better way based on that, maybe global configuration in $config. --smcv

Available in a git repository branch.
Branch: smcv/ready/edittemplate2
Author: Jonathon Anderson, smcv

Here is a version of that branch that I would merge if I could. Changes since Jonathon's version:

• only generate a UUID if needed
• read /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid instead of using UUID::Tiny if available, to avoid the dependency on at least Linux
• remove v3/v5 UUID support since I don't really see the point, and if included, it would need a migration path for $pagestate
• use RFC 3339 time format for time to make the timezone unambiguous
• add html_time which is the output of IkiWiki::displaytime, e.g. a <time> element on HTML5 wikis

I'm not entirely sure what the use-case is for formatted_time, so perhaps either html_time or formatted_time should be removed; but it's not as if they really cost anything.

There doesn't seem to be any strong convention for how we name timestamp variables/objects, so I left the naming as it was.

--smcv

the ready/edittemplate branch looks good to me too. formatted_time and html_time probably don't hurt, but personally i'd not add either and instead expose displaytime as a directive, for otherwise migrating to html5 would leave old evaluations of displaytime around in the repository. (example template: [[!meta date="<TMPL_VAR time>"]]I wrote this post at [[!displaytime "<TMPL_VAR time>"]]). --chrysn

That's a very good point; and Joey added [[!date "<TMPL_VAR time">]], which does the same thing as your hypothetical [[!displaytime ]], almost 5 years ago. Branch replaced by smcv/ready/edittemplate2 which drops formatted_time and html_time, and adds a suggestion to use [[!date ]]. --smcv

merged --smcv