Hello,
I proposed using Flexy on the users group a few weeks ago:
http://groups.google.com/group/symfony-users/browse_frm/thread/40925697e864a069/6dbc51e67bbfab8f?lnk=gst&q=Flexy#6dbc51e67bbfab8f
(is this the best way to link?)
And gave specific reasons why my company needs a templating engine
other than "php as a templating engine"
The response was lukewarm, at best - and like here, ended up as a
discussion of many different alternatives.
Since genshi is Python, the proposal I see here is basically "coding
from scratch" in PHP. I'm not sure that makes a whole lot of sense,
unless it is modified to take advantage of PHP + Symfony.
(See previous posts for my bias: I want my designers, when viewing the
raw template in the browser, to see near exactly what they will get.)
PHPTal is the closest of the PHP engines other than Flexy I have found
that meet my objectives, from looking at the docs - though I haven't
used it, and and may not for Symfony projects because of the license
terms (LGPL) - I want to stay with licenses that works with the
Symfony license.
I can, however, see quite a lot that could be done with a Flexy /
PHPTal / Genshi "style" templating engine, that could be "native" to
symphony.
One consensus I hear is that there is a large group of people that
don't see the need for any templating engine outside of PHP.
Like vi, I think it is great to have and assume that Symfony will
always support straight PHP as a standard, core engine. I nod to
people with this philosophy, acknowledge the need and say "yes, we
need to keep PHP as a templating engine ... it is extremely useful,
needs to be there, and anything moving forward needs this."
Another group needs / wants a something more, for various specific
business reasons.
What I don't want to see happen is for Symfony to fragment again: I'm
already seeing Symfony/Propel being one "framework" that is at least
partly incompatible with Symfony/Doctrine (Doctrine used by the
"experts"?) - and requiring twice the development / support for many
plugins.
I don't want the same to happen on the templating side.
(As an aside ... is there any way to have at least a basic ORM
abstraction layer? ...)
What I would like to see is a "meta" templating engine. Flexy
understands <?php ?> tags. Hence, the Flexy plugin I have kinda
working works with standard auto-generated CRUD, but you can drop down
(move up?) to the alternate tokenized syntax pretty easily.
To make this truly seamless, though, would require some changes to
either Flexy or Symfony, so I'm not sure simple plugin-integration is
the right way to go.
If there is, indeed, going to be new development, my partial wishlist
contains:
- MIT-style license.
- allow the engine to be part of the core, so I can be sure that I can
use it in distributed plugins <- I realize this is completely out of
my control, and a plugin that can co-exist with other engines is an OK
option. Just don't make it an either / or choice!
- understanding and allow <?php ?> and current template syntax: and
allow me to turn it off in the controller or config.
- truly "symfony aware". All templating engines I am aware of have
their own ideas for i18N, l10N, etc. I want it to use Symfony's native
functionality for this .. and any other features symfony has, like
escaping: Flexy + Symfony could escape things twice.
Helpers should be "native" and feel natural to use.
- the generate crud tasks should be "aware" of the engine (plugin?)
- compiling/caching of course is a must.
- Syntax is critical. It is the reason to have an alternate template
engine in the first place, and should be well thought out and
designed. The goal is that I should be able to open up
tempalte.tpl.html in Firefox and see pretty much what I'd get as if I
rendered through the framework. To this end:
- "tag based" - any of:
-- <tr tal:repeat="myitem myarray"> ... </tr> [PHPTal]
-- <tr flexy:foreach="a,k,v"> ... </tr> [Flexy]
-- <tr py:for="link in reversed(links)"> ... </tr> [Genshi] (though
the py:? namespace is a littler weird in php ...)
Is ok
NOT Smarty-style, which screws up rendering and breaks lots of stuff:
<tr>{foreach item='nav' from=$navigation} ... {/foreach}</tr>
- reasonable defaults for rendering in the editor:
<flexy:include src="header.html">Header goes here</flexy:include>
which will display "Header goes here" when you edit the template in a
WYSIWG editor - and disappears when compiled..
- url-rewriting: (From Flexy docs):
"When compiling the template flexy can rewrite <img src, <script src,
<a href and xul stylesheet urls. The format is "match/original:new/
url, match/another/original:new/url" each combo is seperated by a
comma, and the colon seperates the pair. This helps previewing
templates without using the engine.
- support for theming and sensical searching of paths within each
theme. I've seen code-snippets and a plugin(?) that provides some of
this, but haven't explored fully. The engine should address this
natively, not only for "look and feel" but taking into account the
device type as well (mobile, etc). This needs to be seriously thought
out.
The list above is by no means exhaustive, it does cover most of the
core features that I believe are necessary in an additional symfony-
based templating engine.
Benefit: I have 1 project with about 20+ pages. I have the site in a /
mockup/ folder for local editing, and symlinks to various templates/
indexSuccess.html files. By carefully handling routing and image
rewriting (compiled, so production performance is not an issue), one
can browse the site in /mockup/ (statically) and /web/frontend_dev.php
and get a site that "works" in both places - without broken images,
with correct links to other files ... it just works.
That type of rendering is what I'm after.
I am willing / able to contribute resources to a sub-project that
meets these goals, whether it is an integration plugin for an existing
templating engine or new development.
Regards,
Nick
On Oct 16, 7:22 am, "Lucas Stephanou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hello dev's,
>
> I'm here to start a thread about template system.
>
> Today symfony doesn't use natively a template system to render presentation
> layer.
> IMHO, the genshi project[1], used in trac 0.11[2], is more efficient output
> generator and I'm working with it in some plugins to internal use here in my
> job.
> All php options( OPT, Smarty, Haml port) that I knew isn't simple, clean,
> and powerful, this in my opinion.
>
> Well, What you think about? Is PHP a equivalent option? Start a similar
> genshi project in PHP?
>
> [1]:http://genshi.edgewall.org/
> [2]:http://trac.edgewall.org/milestone/0.11
>
> --
> Lucas Stephanou
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