[Phplib-users] template extensions

[Evan H. <hu...@bi...>]

  Howdy, 

  I'm the colleague that Mike mentioned. The remainder of this email is 
a more in-depth description of what Mike had mentioned.

Dr Tarique Sani wrote:
> On 13 Jan 2003, Mike Gifford wrote:
> >                 <td><!-- main content -->
> >                         {Article($ArticleId)}
> one question
> How will the $ArticleId be passed to the template?

  'ArticleId' would be used as a key into the globals array. 

  The germ of my idea doesn't rest on variable passing (although that could be 
a Good Thing, it isn't the basis of my idea). What I'm really interested in 
is backing variables with functions -- which would allow static pages to 
reference content that is generated dynamically. This would allow the creation 
of templates that require no intervention from PHP to render content. 

  Consider the following situation:

  I'm building a site where I want all pages to follow a certain format, and
contain a number of elements that are repeated between pages. However,
different elements will appear on different pages (even though at coding time, 
I'm not sure what will appear where). Say that I want my dynamic elements to 
be:

  Poll - Dynamically generated poll
  RDF - RDF listing of the site's content
  Calendar - A calendar of events
  LoggedIn - A listing of who is logged in
  News - A listing of news items

  I know that these are necessary when I'm writing the code that will generate 
the site, but I'm not sure when or where they will be used (I'm not in control 
of final appearance/layout, someone else is). 


  Using the current architecture I would be forced to define all of these 
elements before evaluating the templates, even if they aren't used in the 
page. 
  
  In a function backed variable architecture, I would define a directory that
would contain a listing of renderers that would produce output for a given
variable names. So, for this example, I would have a directory that would
contain a set of files (functions/Poll.php, functions/RDF.php,
functions/Calendar.php, etc). When the parser in template.inc tried to link a 
variable reference that it doesn't know about, it would check this directory - 
if there is a file that matches the name of the variable, it would be 
evaluated and its output linked into that variable. 
  

  The value of backing variables with functions should be apparent outside of
this example: the one-file-per-variable constraint on content forces
encapsulation of functionality into a single file that would have a
well-defined interface. 

e