It'd be nice to be able to specify an altenate template file to be used for some pages. For example, I'd like most of my pages to use page.tmpl but I want my front page to be formatted in some unique way, so I'd like it to use a separate front.tmp template instead.

I'm not sure what syntax to use for this, ([[template]] seems to be taken for another purpose already). Perhaps something like [[page-template front]] ?).

Joey provided a nice suggestion for implementing this feature, ("I would probably add a hook that allowed overriding the default template constuction and returning a template object"). I did start looking into that, but finally I wimped out and just put the following hack into the genpage() function in Render.pm:

if ($page eq 'index') {
    $template->param(suppresstitle => 1);
}

That lets me use a <TMPL_UNLESS SUPPRESSTITLE> in my template to get the effect I want. I don't think that's anything that upstream should pick-up as is, (maybe with an appropriate configuration option, but then again allowing for per-page template selection would be more powerful anyway). But I'm happy enough now that I probably won't pursue implementing this feature further myself.

But I'd still happily switch to using this feature if someone were to implement it.

UPDATE: My latest hack is as follows:

if ($page eq 'index') {
    $template->param(toplevelindex => 1);
}

And that's something that I'm not actually embarrassed to suggest could be accepted upstream. Joey, what do you think? And would a proper patch be helpful (it really just adds those lines to the right place).

Fully implemented as a templatefile hook and a pagetemplate plugin. --Joey done