I would like to allow comments on ikiwiki pages without CGI. I have in mind something like
- Use a pagetemplate hook
in a plugin (DONE) - add a mailto: url to each page matching some pagespec (currently every page gets a comment footer)
this mailto url goes to an address identifying the page (something like user-iki-FE653b@host.fqdn.tld). (DONE)
I wonder if it would be more or less natural to put an encoded form of the page name in the email address? I'm thinking about something like
wikiname+index@host
orwikiname+todo+comment_by_mail@host
. The basic transformation would be to calltitlepage($page)
(in the C locale), followed by replacing "/" with "+" (since "/" is not valid in mails). --JoeyI guess you are right, there is no point being more obscure than necessary. I am leaning towards something not
calling titlepage but in the same spirit. --DavidBremneron the mail receiving end, these messages are either deleted, or ran through a filter to be turned into blog posts.
- I'm thinking about how the filter should work. Within a mail client, or as a batch tool to scan a mailbox? How to interact with version control, if at all?
the same plugin can check for comments on a particular page next time the wiki is generated, and add a link. (more or less done)
If the filter just checks in the posts into revision control, the post-commit hook would handle updating the wiki to include those posts as they come in. --Joey
work in progress can be
Any comments? Write them here or send them to DavidBremner
I don't want to derail this with too much blue-skying, but I was thinking earlier that it would be nice if ikiwiki could do something sensible with mailbox files, such as turning them into a (threaded?) blog display.
One reason I was thinking about that was just that it would be nice to be able to use ikiwiki for mailing list archives. But another reason was that it would be nice to solve the problem described in discussion page as blog. For that you really want a threaded system, and mailbox file formats already have threading.
If that were done, it would tie into what you're working on in an interesting way, since the incoming mail would only need to be committed to the appropriate mailbox file, with ikiwiki then running to process it. --Joey
It is an interesting idea. I like that it uses an arbitrary MUA as a "moderation" interface. One thing it made me think about is how to encode reference (threading) information. One can of course encode this into local-part, but I wonder if it would be better to use header features of mailto (this could also be an alternative to tagged mail addresses for page references).
Various client handling of mailto always seemed a bit fragile to me but maybe I am just behind the times. Most headers are ignored, but pseudo-headers in the body might work. For example: test. I hesitate to use the subject because every mail admin in the world seems to want to add things to the front of it. -- DavidBremnerAlthough it is in python, just from reading the Debian ITP, it looks like mnemosyne-blog
might be an interesting backend to use or at least steal ideas from--DavidBremner