Re: [PyCS-devel] RFC: templating system proposal

[Georg B. <gb...@mu...>]

Hi!

> Would anyone care to  elaborate on the objectives of the template 
> system?  Will the templates see the light of day on the client-side 
> like Radio's templates are exposed?  If so, there should be a way for 
> designers and content owners see what is going on, correct?

Hmm. At current time I think the biggest value would come out of using 
the templates for the programming part of PyCS - to allow Phil and me 
and others to easily write up modules with dynamic content and separate 
programming and designing. And I think I would like to use them to build 
administrative interfaces - the first round will mostly concentrate on 
the usual sysadmin stuff.

There might be a second stage when I find a good and easy way to build 
Python "sandboxes" to evaluate code, because then I can integrate them 
directly into medusa via a  template handler - this would enable us to 
use template functionality on the server via Radio templates. This would 
actually be quite weird, as you would write Radio templates to create 
HTML files that use Cheetah template code to evaluate on the server. It 
would be quite cool, as it would break one limit Radio currently has, 
that it only can export static content and has to rely on Javascript and 
pulled-in modules for dynamicity. Look at the hacks done for the Radio 
Nuggets - that's really cool JavaScript hackery, but it is hackery 
nontheless, and would be far easier and stable if not using JavaScript. 
(For a stability example: ActiveRenderer doesn't work with Opera on 
Linux and some versions of IE - that's always a problem with JavaScript, 
the little differences).

To use it on the client side directly, you would have to run something 
build in python. So it might be a nice fit for Phil's bzero, where it 
could give you the same functionality as the templates in Radio. But 
that's up to Phil, as bzero is not open source :-)

bye, Georg