In particular, it's kind of annoying that using the sidebar plugin results in the creation of a free-standing sidebar.html (which in the simplest case of course includes a copy of its own content as a sidebar). It would be nice if there were a way to tell Ikiwiki to treat a file like sidebar.mdwn as "inline only": allow its content to be inlined but not to render it separately nor allow linking to it.

In reading through the code and associated docs, it appears that the ideal method is for the file to be removed from the $changed array by plugin's "needsbuild" hook. Either the sidebar plugin could define such a hook, or perhaps a more general solution is the creation of a meta variable or config file regexp that would handle it according to the user's wishes.

I'm about ready to code up such a change but want to find out if I'm thinking along the right lines. --blipvert

Internal pages should be able to be used for this, as they are used for comments. So you'd have sidebar._mdwn. However, mwdn would need to be changed to register a htmlize hook for the _mdwn extension for that to really work.

But, if there's no rendered sidebar page, how can users easily edit the page in the web interface? In the specific case of the sidebar, It seems better to have the page display something different when built standalone than when built as the sidebar. --Joey