DokuWiki Changes

DokuWiki Changes is a record of every place this installation patches DokuWiki core directly (inc/, bin/, entry points), plus an honest assessment of which patches actually required touching core versus which ones could have been ordinary plugins. lib/tpl/ and lib/plugins/ are separate, gitignored git repositories not covered here except where they interact with a core patch.

Had to be core

One change genuinely could not have been a plugin.

Page file extension .txt → .md (inc/init.php defines DOKU_EXT). DokuWiki hardcodes .txt as a string literal in wikiFN() (inc/pageutils.php), the extension filters and pathID() in inc/search.php, the page-file glob in inc/TreeBuilder/PageTreeBuilder.php, namespace templates in inc/common.php, and the export filename in inc/Action/Export.php. None of these are event hooks, they're direct string comparisons and concatenations scattered through code that runs on every page load. There is no extension point a plugin could intercept to change what “a page file” means globally. bin/wantedpages.php and the new bin/migrate-ext.php needed the same fix for consistency.

Could plausibly have been plugins

These touch core but DokuWiki exposes an event or extension mechanism that would have avoided it.

Cache invalidation on save (inc/Action/Save.php, commit 3146996). Explicitly clears CacheInstructions and CacheRenderer after a save so a no-op re-save still forces a re-render. DokuWiki fires COMMON_WIKIPAGE_SAVE around this exact point; an action plugin hooking that event and calling the same two cache classes would have done this without editing core.
Math, eqn, latex_figure rendering (inc/parser/renderer.php + inc/parser/xhtml.php, commit fb8ba4b). Added three new renderer methods with abstract stubs. New markup syntax is the textbook case for a DokuWiki syntax plugin (extends DokuWiki_Syntax_Plugin, registering connectTo() patterns and its own render() implementation) — the KaTeX plugin already sitting alongside this proves the pattern works. Patching the renderer directly means every future DokuWiki upgrade has to be re-merged against these three methods.
Open Graph tags (tpl_socialcard() in inc/template.php). Injects <meta property="og:..."> tags. tpl_metaheaders() already fires Event::createAndTrigger('TPL_METAHEADER_OUTPUT', $head, ...) right after the point these tags are added — an action plugin hooking that event and pushing entries onto $head['meta'] would produce identical output with zero core changes.
Favicon PNG/JPG-before-ICO lookup (tpl_favicon() in inc/template.php). This isn't even a plugin candidate so much as a template candidate: tpl_favicon() is called by the template, and a custom template fully controls its own <head>. The lookup could have been written directly in the yanevskiv template's header code instead of changing the shared core function every template on the install uses.
Ace editor integration (inc/Ui/Editor.php, inc/template.php, commits 1c211c0, fc74044). Swaps the plain <textarea> for an Ace-backed editor and injects the Ace <script> tag. Ui\Editor::addTextarea() is itself invoked through Event::createAndTrigger('EDIT_FORM_ADDTEXTAREA', $data, [$this, 'addTextarea'], true) — the event exists precisely so a plugin can override what gets rendered in that slot. The later “edit bar above textarea” commit (fc74044) reordered PHP render calls to move the edit bar's HTML earlier in the form; the same visual effect (bar before textarea) is achievable with plain CSS (flex/order) without touching render order in inc/Ui/Editor.php at all.
(WIP) sitemap grouping (inc/Ui/Index.php, commit 460adbf). Splits /sitemap into “Work in progress” / “Finished pages” by checking p_get_first_heading($id). Borderline: there's no clean hook to restructure the built-in index listing, so a plugin would have had to reimplement do=index wholesale as its own action plugin rather than patch three lines of grouping logic into the existing one. Reasonable to leave as a core patch, but worth another look if TPL_CONTENT_DISPLAY or a similar filter existed for this specific list.

Legitimately core (no clean alternative)

wikilink-wip CSS class on internal links (inc/parser/xhtml.php, commit 56ae807). Adding a CSS class to the existing internallink() renderer method based on p_get_first_heading(). Same category as the math renderer methods above — arguably a syntax/action plugin territory in principle, but since it modifies the existing wikilink1/wikilink2 class logic rather than adding new syntax, there's no clean plugin seam for “change the CSS class DokuWiki already assigns to links it already renders.”
Clean /sitemap and /media URLs (inc/Menu/Item/Index.php, inc/Menu/Item/Media.php, commits 460adbf, e60fe2d). Overrides getLink() on core menu item classes that SiteMenu/MobileMenu instantiate directly with no filter hook in between. Short of post-processing the rendered menu HTML with a template-level regex (fragile), this needed a direct override.

Abandoned experiment: `feat/Markup` branch

Fifteen commits between November 2025 and February 2026 built a hand-rolled markup engine at inc/Markup/Markup.php (tokenizer, block scanning, \begin/\end, line commands, \itemize/\enumerate) — apparently aimed at parsing LaTeX-like structure more thoroughly than the current latex_figure stub (which just renders as a raw latex code block, per inc/parser/xhtml.php). This work never merged into master; it lives only on the feat/Markup branch and isn't deployed anywhere. Worth revisiting if latex_figure ever needs real structural parsing instead of pass-through rendering.

Companion tooling, not core changes

bin/texrender — a POSIX shell script (LaTeX → SVG/PNG/PDF via texfot/pdflatex-family tools) tracked in bin/ per this repo's convention. It's a standalone CLI, not a DokuWiki patch; it doesn't touch any inc/ code and DokuWiki has no concept of it.
bin/migrate-ext.php — new script to rename pages and attic revisions between extensions. Tooling, not a runtime change.

Plugins already done right

For contrast, katex, markdowku, man, and socialicons are all proper plugins living in the gitignored lib/plugins/, touching zero core files. man in particular hooks ACTION_ACT_PREPROCESS and TPL_ACT_UNKNOWN to serve entirely synthetic pages without ever writing to data/pages — proof that even fairly deep integrations (routing, rendering, caching) are achievable through the plugin API when the right event exists.

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