Re: templating, anyone?

Justin Patrin wrote:

On Fri, 3 Sep 2004 19:17:21 -0700, Sebastian <buddhahead@gmail.com> wrote:

What is so horrible about variety?

If you have multiple packages that do exactly the same thing in the same way, the efforts of the developers are split. Why waste your time working on, maintaining, fixing bugs on, and adding features to the same thing that someone else wrote and it maintaining? Combine your efforts and make one of them twice as good.

I agree, it's better to synchronize with other developers for a such topic as templates than to start yet-another-supposed-to-be-revolutionary package, when php itself is, originally, a template solution by itself (and hasn't it already achieved that revolution ?). Now, I think there is a _real_ lack, for Dreamweaver Templates. That is something that could be incredibly useful, and for which I've seen support nowhere. With Dreamweaver templates, Macromedia indeed has made possible what many of web dev teams dream about : separating the job of the designer and the developer. The Dreamweaver interface puts up a very nice interface for setting up and modifying so called 'editable' areas : a graphic designer just has to point-and-click on little arrows and the like, and that creates powerful tags like : <table>

    <!-- InstanceBeginRepeat name="newsData" -->
    <!-- InstanceBeginRepeatEntry -->
    <tr>  	
      <td>	
        <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="title" -->
          Here comes the current news title
        <!-- InstanceEndEditable -->
      </td>
      <td>
        <!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="date" -->
          Here comes the current news title
        <!-- InstanceEndEditable -->
      </td>
    </tr>
    <!-- InstanceEndRepeatEntry -->
    <!-- InstanceEndRepeat -->

</table> In the above example a, say, HTML_DreamweaverTemplate package would generate a variable length list of news, using variables like $newsData[]['title'], $newsData[]['date'], etc... This is amazingly powerful, because the designer can modify the design while the developer has already started to provide and test dynamic features. I don't have myself time to work on a such project, but as you feel like templating, I offer you and others this idea of mine. -- og