My understanding (and merlin will no doubt correct me if I'm wrong) is that while theme engines have been there for a while no one actually used one besides PHPTemplate. Smarty and PHPTal were used as tag libraries on top of PHPTemplate. So what's happened is that the engine portion of PHPTemplate has been absorbed into core (with various refactoring to make it faster, better, stronger). I believe swappable tag libraries (named engines, technically wrongly at this point) are still possible if the maintainers of those engines choose to upgrade. (As an aside, I really think Smarty is overkill if it's just used as a tag library. Smarty's big benefit would be in pull-based templates, whereas Drupal, like most web apps, uses push-based templates. I now step down from the soap box.) On Thursday 03 May 2007, Robin Monks wrote:
Hey,
From someone who hasn't really been following the changes, but who really hates PHPTemplate (which is designed more toward developers, rather than graphics artists and end users IMHO) and would much rather use Smarty... Will Smarty still be available as an option in 6? AKA. Will theme engines support still be there?
Robin
On 5/3/07, Earl Miles <merlin@logrus.com> wrote:
Now that the new theming system is basically in (I have one outstanding patch and 2 more in the hopper that are not yet at patch level, but they shouldn't affect this), we now need a coordinated effort to properly .tpl-ify the majority of Drupal's theming functions.
At the same time, I think we should also be looking at what isn't themable enough in Drupal and try to correct that at the same time. And this is a good place to try and correct Drupal's HTML/XHTML code to conform to the proper standards.
The Themer Pack project was started as a gateway to this, and it hasn't been entirely successful (though I give HUGE HUGE HUGE kudos to dvessel who did a LOT of work on the themerpack, and calebg who started to but got busy).
-- Larry Garfield AIM: LOLG42 larry@garfieldtech.com ICQ: 6817012 "If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it." -- Thomas Jefferson