I initially thought this wasn't actually necessary - the combination of template with field's pagetemplate hook ought to provide the same functionality. However, template doesn't run pagetemplate hooks; a more general version of this plugin would be to have a variant of template that runs pagetemplate hooks (probably easiest to just patch template to implement a second directive, or have a special parameter run_hooks="yes", or something).

I got the impression that pagetemplate hooks are intended to be completely independent of template variables; page-template is for the actual page.tmpl template, while template is for other templates which are used inside the page content. So I don't understand why one would need a run_hooks option. --KathrynAndersen

Render, inline, comments and recentchanges run pagetemplate hooks, as does anything that uses IkiWiki::misctemplate. From that quick survey, it seems as though template is the only thing that uses HTML::Template but doesn't run pagetemplate hooks?

It just seems strange to me that field needs to have its own variant of template (this), its own variant of inline (report), and so on - I'd tend to lean more towards having field enhance the existing plugins. I'm not an ikiwiki committer, mind... Joey, your opinion would be appreciated! --smcv

I did it that way basically because I needed the functionality ASAP, and I didn't want to step on anyone's toes, so I made them as separate plugins. If Joey wants to integrate the functionality into IkiWiki proper, I would be very happy, but I don't want to put pressure on him. --KathrynAndersen

Another missing thing is that ftemplate looks in the "system" templates directories, not just in the wiki, but that seems orthogonal (and might be a good enhancement to template anyway). --smcv

Yes, I added that because I wanted the option of not having to make all my templates work as wiki pages also. --KathrynAndersen

Joey has added support for user-defined templates outside the wiki now. --s