## First Pass

Looking at the discussion about [[todo/structured_page_data]], it looks a bit like folks are bogged down in figuring out what *markup* to use for structured page data, something I doubt that people will really agree on.  And thus, little progress is made.

I propose that, rather than worry about what the data looks like, that we take a similar approach
to the way Revision Control Systems are used in ikiwiki: a front-end + back-end approach.
The front-end would be a common interface, where queries are made about the structured data,
and there would be any number of back-ends, which could use whatever markup or format that they desired.

To that purpose, I've written the [[plugins/contrib/field]] plugin for a possible front-end.
I called it "field" because each page could be considered a "record" where one could request the values of "fields" of that record.
The idea is that back-end plugins would register functions which can be called when the value of a field is desired.

This is gone into in more depth on the plugin page itself, but I would appreciate feedback and improvements on the approach.
I think it could be really powerful and useful, especially if it becomes part of ikiwiki proper.

--[[KathrynAndersen]]

> It looks like an interesting idea.  I don't have time right now to look at it in depth, but it looks interesting. -- [[Will]]

## Second Pass

I have written additional plugins which integrate with the [[plugins/contrib/field]] plugin to both set and get structured page data.

* [[plugins/contrib/getfield]] - query field values inside a page using {{$*fieldname*}} markup
* [[plugins/contrib/ftemplate]] - like [[plugins/template]] but uses "field" data as well as passed-in data
* [[plugins/contrib/ymlfront]] - looks for YAML-format data at the front of a page; this is just one possible back-end for the structured data

--[[KathrynAndersen]]