I have implemented my university's PowerPoint templates in Beamer, and have run into a corner issue regarding page numbers. So far, I have opted for the straightforward solution, that is, checking if a slide is the first, and not printing the page number if it is.
However, some would like to have presentations without title pages, and then the page number should be shown nonetheless. Also, if the title page comes later, it should not have a page number. I have solved that issue with a workaround: A specific titlepage command that sets footline and background beamertemplates locally. However, it is not entirely satisfactory, since I don't think the end user should have to know such commands.
The current code is available at https://github.com/martstr/beamerthementnu/tree/master/beamerthementnu2017
Most of you will probably know that the reason this is difficult is because the footline and background templates are called before beamer can know whether it will be a title page or not.
I'm looking for ideas to make the placement of the title page completely flexible. Since I haven't made a MWE for this, I will be perfectly happy to do the details of suggested workarounds myself, and report back with a completed solution.
My only criterion is that it should only require standard elements for the end user, whereas my own code in the sty files perfectly well can contain ugly hacks.
