Published 2003-10-12 11:23:05
demian from PHPkitchen uses my template engine in his framework (hehe we all have one of those..) anyway - he was upgrading from the original early version to the current CVS one. Which has a tokenizer and is a 2 part parser/compiling system.. (pretty awesome really)
Two of the things problems he found where
a) includes
Includes in the old engine used {include:#xxxx.html#}, I disabled this for numerous reasons in the new engine, but have been tempted into bringing it back. The current thought on it is this:
<flexy:include src="xxx.html" />
of course if you really want to get clever with it you can do things like
<flexy:include src="xxx.html"><B>xxx.html goes here</b></flexy:include>
which will display xxx.html goes here whey you edit the template in a WYSIWG editor - and disappears when compiled..
b) javascript and scripts.
You can not use flexy tags {varname} in javascript blocks surrounded by <script></script>, as the whole thing gets too messy with it accidentally replacing stuff it shouldnt..
So if you need to send variables to javascript you can use
<flexy:toJavascript flexy:prefix="xxxxx_"
abc="xyz"
bcd="wxy"
/>
this is turned into php code that converts $object->xyz into xxxxx_abc in javascript
eg. in php
$this->xyz = 1234;
$this->wxy = "hello"
$flexy->outputObject($this);
using the above tags - it ends up at the browser as
<script language="javascript">
var abc = 1234;
var bcd="hello";
</script>
Extend me!
Both of these are contained in the HTML_Template_Flexy_Compiler_Standard_Flexy
class. The idea of this directory is clever - if you want to create your own namespace tags: eg. <mytag:test xxx="tttt"> all you need to do is create a file in the Standard folder called Mytag.php and implement testToString() method.
Comments
Absolutely awesome (Flexy in general, and the namespace tags stuff). It seems to give you most of what JSP/TAGLIB does, but you don't have to run a silly Java Servlet runner. I think it would be good if there were additional configurable extensions directory(s). And perhaps a generic class with the basic functions already in them, that people can extend from. The option to convert the Token_* classes to Flexy_Elements (not very hard I wouldn't think - just a quick recursion?), would also be nice.
If I can get my head around some of it I might submit some patches. :)
