What templates DWiki uses

Per ProcessingModel, DWiki ultimately produces output by expanding a template. This means that DWiki has to figure out what template to use for this process, and because the TemplateSyntax is fairly limited, it is much simpler for DWiki to start with a separate template for every different view of things it wants to have.

This means that while DWiki tries not to hardcode template names or the structure of the template directory, there are a certain amount of hardcoded names it knows about that need to be there for proper DWiki operation.

The short list of such templates is:

• dwiki/view-*.tmpl, dwiki.tmpl: starting view templates.
• views/*: conventional location for templates that display a particular ordinary view.
• error.tmpl, errors/*: displaying errors (always 404 responses).
• login-error.tmpl: displaying a login error (a regular page, not a 404).
• Comment templates:
  • comment/comment.tmpl: used to show each comment when we're showing all comments.
  • comment/posting.tmpl: used to show the result of posting a comment. By convention, comment/posted-<result>.tmpl is used to display specific results, where <result> is one of 'good' (the comment was posted successfully), 'bad' (something went wrong), 'badchars' (the comment has bad characters in it), or 'nocomment' (the comment was empty and DWiki refused to post it).
• blog/blogdirpage.tmpl: used to show each page in BlogDir view.
• blog/blogentry.tmpl: used to show each page in Blog view.
• syndication/atomentry.tmpl: used to render an Atom feed entry for each page.
• syndication/atomcomment.tmpl: used to render an Atom feed entry for each comment.
• syndication/rss2entry.tmpl: used to render an RSS 2.0 feed entry for each page.

All paths are relative to the template directory.

Determining a template for a view

For views that are displayed using templates, DWiki tries to find the starting template by looking in three places, in order:

1. dwiki/view-<view>-<pagetype>.tmpl
2. dwiki/view-<view>.tmpl
3. dwiki.tmpl

By convention, everything that generates text/html pages just goes through dwiki.tmpl so that there is one place that does top-level 'skinning' for the entire DWiki. Only views that both use templates and generate something besides text/html sidestep this.

The standard dwiki.tmpl uses the #{<...} first-found template inclusion mechanism (see TemplateSyntax) to pull in the real per-view content. It looks in four places to try to find this content, in this order:

1. Overrides/...$(page)/$(view-format).tmpl
2. Overrides/...$(page)/all.tmpl
3. views/$(view-format)-$(pagetype).tmpl
4. views/$(view-format).tmpl

The first two allow page and directory hierarchy specific overrides; the latter two are the generic places. Most views don't need to distinguish between file types, but the 'normal' view must use different templates for files and directories (since a directory doesn't have wikitext to display).

The current template-based views are: normal, history, search, blog, blogdir, atom, atomcomments, sitemap, showcomments, and writecomment. The login and logout views are 'synthetic' and don't actually display anything unless an error happens. The 'source' view simply dumps the page content out straight without getting anywhere near templates.

Note that the atom and atomcomments views are special: although they render through templates, they generate application/atom+xml content instead of text/html. Thus they use dwiki/view-* templates directly, bypassing dwiki.tmpl. The sitemap view is similarly special, although it generates application/xml content.

Error templates

Errors are rendered by the template error.tmpl. There are special error renderers error::title and error::body that look for error-specific additional templates in the subdirectory errors/. Each type of error looks for titles as errors/<error>-title.tmpl and main error body as errors/<error>.tmpl (with internal defaults if they don't exist).

Current error types: badaccess, badformat, badpage, inconsistpage, nopage.

Everything else is free and floating

That's it. DWiki has no other hardcoded template names.