It would be nice for some plugins to use hashes as setup data structures (which ones? pagespec aliases for one. Any others?), but these cannot currently be adequately described in getsetup(), nor represented in websetup(). It would be nice to extend ikiwiki to support this.

I've had an initial go at how to represent this in a nice way within a HTML page. An initial mock up is available at https://github.com/jmtd/ikiwiki/blob/websetup_hashes/hash.html. The approach taken is to use a javascript hash/dictionary as the canonical copy of the data; to express that in the form elements, and to capture all relevant events to update the main data structure (and the HTML representations thereof).

I imagine packing the js structure into a form element which is posted, and ignoring the other form element data.

This would mean mandating javascript support for editing such hashes.

— Jon

I really don't like mandating javascript for anything in ikiwiki.

Ikiwiki's websetup is built using CGI::FormBuilder, which makes it easy to create forms for simple stuff, but does not allow custom UI for complex stuff. This does not seem compatable with that, unless your idea is to have a separate form for these more complex things. --Joey