Note : In this post, I only consider Ikiwiki as a static site compiler, not a wiki engine.

I have been using Ikiwiki for some years, writing several packages, making some small contributions, and I somehow have the feeling that IkiWiki is getting old (maybe it has some technological debt). Among the things I am missing is:

• it is written in Perl, and I don't know Perl;
• I think it could benefit from using OOP (object oriented programming);
• the template system is very very limited (compared to some modern template engines, like Jinja2 or Django).

So I looked at other static site generators (only in Python, because it is the only programming language I master). My thought was: since Ikiwiki is old (as Joeyh said: it was a static site generator before we knew what those were. It wasn't the first, but it broke plenty of new ground), modern static site generators should be as good as Ikiwiki, with some design mistakes fixed, right? I was wrong.

Here are a few things that Ikiwiki does well, that other tools miss (and I might be biaised, but do no think that my opinion about it is an aversion to change: I do think Ikiwiki does it better).

• The other tools I tried use separate pages from images from data (each one is in its own tree directory structure). There are workarounds, but they might have caveats. This might be linked to the next point:
• Wikilinks are great! I did not like them at first (I feared that if a page foo was linked to bar, this link might be broken later if another page bar was created, with a higher precedence than the original one). But I ended up liking it.
• The way other tools can be extended seems not clean: I do not want to write complex stuff or have to use regexp to match my new directive (or wathever it is called). Ikiwiki directive are great: writing a new directive is both very simple and very effective.
• Ikiwiki documentation is great (for other tools I tried, it is acceptable for using the static site, but poor for extending it).

Well, this post was meant to congratulate joey and every ikiwiki contributors: its design is great (I already used "great" a few times, sorry for my poor vocabulary). What next? I can hope that every single user and contributor of ikiwiki decide to rewrite it in Python3 (to keep the great ideas, integrate some more modern tools, and avoid a fork), or, to be more realistic, I could go back in time to convince/bribe/coerce Joey to write it in Python (which would not solve everything, but would make it easier for me to contribute). A more serious path would be to have a look at staticsite which is written by Enrico Zini, who seems to want the same thing I want: a "more modern" ikiwiki.

-- Louis