suggested mod to resource plugin design in smarty

Hi- I've been enjoying working with smarty. It seems to be pretty well put together. I wanted to say "thanks". I tried to send the following to monte@php.net - as suggested on the smarty web site, but that address was bounced by "MAILER-DAEMON@php.net", so I'm sending to the list instead... I've made some modifications to smarty to support a more full-featured resource plugin interface. The primary reason for these changes was, initially, to allow the resource plugin to set the compile-id *before* smarty went looking for the cache and the compiled file. This was important in my application, because I wanted to write a resource that could load templates using a hierarchy of template dirs that changed based on application state. In my case, it was possible to have many different templates, each called "widget.tpl", that lived in different directories, and were rendered by different components at different times during the request, all using the same smarty object. To facilitate this I have made the following changes to smarty in my installation: **1) The resource plugin interface of smarty can now support an additional design for resource plugins. The old (4 functions) way is still supported, but I have upfit smarty to understand a new paradigm that uses a PHP class for the plugin definition. This allows the plugin to maintain state, as well as to be extended rather seamlessly. **2) When smarty attempts to load a template (or a php file) through the new resource loader, the resource plugin simply returns a resource_handle object instance that is specific to the requested template name. This object encapsulates all further interaction with the underlying template of that name. This allows the resource plugin to delay loading the source for the file, until it is really needed (without any confusing boolean flags to pass around). It also allows the resource plugin to cache resource_handles if it so desires, to further speed template retrieval. **3) There were a number of places where smarty was making multiple queries to the resource plugin for information about a single template, rather than just asking once, and then reusing the data. The number of areas where this happens has been reduced. This was accomplished by passing around the resource_handle instead of passing around a template name string. Since the resource_handle encapsulates the actual resource item, every function that receives a resource_handle has easy, quick access to all the information regarding the underlying item. This also resulted in a considerable amount of coincidental code-cleanup in a couple of places. **4) I think that all this was done without breaking any external interfaces on the smarty object. I can easily send any source (including the changed smarty source, example of a "new-style" resource class, and/or example of a template that uses the resource) if anyone is interested. If you think this would be a useful mod to roll back into the smarty main tree, I would be glad to do that in a couple of weeks when I get the time. I just need who ever is in charge (Monte?) to give the go-ahead, and point me at the right place to make the changes. There are a number of comments, and a bit of documentation that I would need to write before I'd be ok releasing it on any large scale to anyone other than myself. ;-) thanks for your time, -Lee Coltrane lee@trifolium.com