[development] New theming engine for Rails

[Gary (Lists)]

"Chris Messina" wrote:

> Might be worth a look... I certainly like the design requirements:
> 
>   * It has to have beautiful and simple markup. Template engines which don't
> produce good looking markup are no fun to use.
>
>   * It needs to be non evaling and secure. Liquid templates are made so that
> users can edit them. You don't want to run code on your server which your
> users wrote.

Oops. That might exclude Drupal altogether. (On both counts...? ;)

>   * It has to be stateless. Compile and render steps have to be separate so
> that the expensive parsing and compiling can be done once and later on you can
> just render it passing in a hash with local variables and objects.

I have often wondered why every "coder" likes to re-invent the wheel.  I get
the learning nature of that choice, but not the productivity nature.

Anyway, there are some __very under-represented__ tools called 'pat', or PHP
Application Tools.  They are open-source and they are brilliant.

<http://www.php-tools.net/site.php>

Drupal should really consider using parts of this system. It provides all
kinds of rock-solid code, professional development of code, and a
lightning-fast PHP templating system, complete with cacheable templates.

I think others might want to check these tools out.  They are not "beginner"
really, but they are still not hard to use.  (I would say Beginner Plus is
about all that's needed...and some idea of PHP classes and objects.)

I still rely on 'pat' to do very much of the work at a number of sites, and
I will continue to use 'pat' even with Drupal.  I've been using 'pat' for
about 2 years now, and I find a number of the modules to be stunning in
their quality and clarity.

patForms, patNewsletter, patRSS, patTemplate, and more.

>   * It needs to be able to style emails as well as html.

Blech! -2 points.

--
Gary
...we don't need no stinkin' HTMaiL...