ikiwiki/doc/todo/plugin_data_storage.mdwn

ikiwiki currently stores some key data in .ikiwiki/index. Some plugins need a
way to store additional data, and ideally it would be something managed by
ikiwiki instead of ad-hoc because:

* consistency is good
* ikiwiki knows when a page is removed and can stop storing data for that
  page; plugins have to go to some lengths to track that and remove their
  data
* it's generally too much code and work to maintain a separate data store

The aggregate plugin is a use-case: of 324 lines, 70 are data storage and
another 10 handle deletion. Also, it's able to use a format very like
ikiwiki's, but it does need to store some lists in there, which complicates
it some and means that a very naive translation between a big per-page hash
and the .index won't be good enough.

The current ikiwiki index format is not very flexible, although it is at
least fairly easy and inexpensive to parse as well as hand-edit.

Would this do: ?

* Plugins can register savestate and loadstate hooks. The hook id is the
  key used in the index file that the hook handles.
* loadstate hooks are called and passed a list of all values for a page
  that for the registered key, and the page name, and should store the data
  somewhere
* savestate hooks are called and passed a page, and should return a list of 
  all values for that key for that page
* If they need anything more complex than a list of values, they will need
  to encode it somehow in the list.

Hmm, that's potentially a lot of function calls per page eave load/save
though.. For less function calls, only call each hook *once* per load/save,
and it is passed/returns a big hash of pages and the values for each page.
(Which probably means `%state=@_` for load and `return %state` for save.)

It may also be better to just punt on lists, and require plugins that need
even lists to encode them. Especially since in many cases, `join(" ", @list)`
will do. Er hmm, if I do that though, I'm actually back to a big global
%page_data that plugins can just toss data into, arn't I? So maybe that's
%the right approach after all, hmm.. Except that needing to decode/encode list
data all the time when using it would quite suck, so no, let's not do that.

Note that for the aggregate plugin to use this, it will need some changes:

* guid data will need to be stored as part of the data for the page
  that was aggregated from that guid. Except, expired pages don't exit, but
  still have guid data to store. Hmm. I suppose the guid data could be
  considered to be associated with the page that contains the aggregate
  directive then.
* All feeds will need to be marked as removable in loadstate, and only
  unmarked if seen in preprocess. Then savestate will need to not only
  remove any feeds still marked as such, but do the unlinking of pages
  aggregated from them too.

If I do this, I might as well also:

* Change the link= link= stuff to just links=link+link etc.
* Change the delimiter from space to comma; commas are rare in index files,
  so less ugly escaped delimiters to deal with.

--- 

The [[plugins/calendar]] plugin could use plugin data storage to record
which pages have a calendar for the current time. Then ensure they are
rebuilt at least once a day. Currently, it needs a cron job to rebuild
the *whole* wiki every day; with this enhancement, the cron job would only
rebuild the few pages that really need it.