Re: templates with php

> Rasmus, your template sytsem certainly has matured, into the best > server-side scripting language I have used (actually make that the best > scripting language I have used period.) What it isn't any more - at least to > me - is a template system. Perhaps we need something like the PHP Template > Engine to give us that back? The fact that it can do a lot more does not invalidate it asa template system. A concrete example: <? require "logic.inc" ?> <TABLE> <? while(fetch_products()): ?> <TR><TD><?=$name?></TD><TD><?=$price?></TD></TR> <? endwhile ?> </TABLE> It should be obvious what fetch_products() would look like in logic.inc My main beef with templating systems is that they do not give the designers enough credit. And the ones that do, do so in a way that the poor designer ends up learning a complex and useless tag language (like CF) that doesn't translate to anything else. By having designers slowly learn what a while loop is. And then perhaps an if/else condition. You might find that eventually they will be able to handle making changes to logic.inc and pretty soon the sharper ones will completely eliminate any need for a "programmer" to have to keep babysitting them. I have run across a number of people over the years that told me that they learned how to program from using PHP. All they could manage in the beginning was to use include "header.html" type stuff. But the fact that they were not limited to this inspired them to keep trying new things. On a number of large projects I have created short cheat sheets for the HTML jockeys. As they asked for more entries to be added to the cheat sheet I started showing them how and where these magical tags were defined. Pretty soon they stopped asking me for stuff and they managed to maintain logic.inc on their own. They still maintained the code separation between layout and logic, but because the tool and scripting language they used for both were one and the same, they didn't have this insurmountable mental barrier of being forced to "program" just to manipulate the logic a bit. If I had created some artificial stripped down template language for them, I'd still be getting requests for new tags today, two years later. -Rasmus