Re: My stab at the templates

[Shawn T Amundson <amundson eventloop com>]

On Mon, Jun 18, 2001 at 11:57:06PM -0500, Steve Fox wrote:
> On 18 Jun 2001 23:27:41 -0500, Shawn T Amundson wrote:
> > I know PHP has been stated time and time again as the preferred 
> > choice, but I must point out that it really doesn't look too 
> > maintainable when you start to discuss serious themability and 
> > especially multi-lingual sites.
> 
> Do you know from experience? I guess I ask because I've seen a few
> multi-lingual sites happily using PHP, (eg, mandrakeforum.com,
> sourceforge.net, any PHP-Nuke based site).

I have a lot of experience creating dynamic themable and multi-lingual
sites.  Not much PHP experience.

Perhaps starting with the system from one of the above mentioned sites 
would be a good idea if their stuff works well.  Or at least getting
feedback about what they spend most of their time doing when it comes
to multi-lingual stuff would be invaluable.  Creating a templating 
system and methodologies for handling a themable and multi-lingual site 
shouldn't really be what this group has to deal with.

> > My solution to this problem:
> > 
> >   http://www.eventloop.com/fabric/
> > 
> > It works extremely well in the theme and multi-lingual areas.  And 
> > there is *total* seperation between code and templates, which makes
> > it really easy to let translators edit text without the need for 
> > digging through code or other methodologies.
> 
> While I can admire the separation provided, my gut reaction is *yuck* as
> it is java based. I think Java is overkill for any website as PHP is so
> much faster to learn and use. 

Java is wonderful as long as you don't need to use AWT, Swing, or any of
the other horrible associated class libraries.  But let's not start a 
language war - if group is anti-Java, you won't hurt my feelings.  I just
wanted to provide Fabric as an option - it's why we GPLed it.  It is also
what www.gtk.org will use, and the group would get a lot of help from me
if we went with Fabric.  I'd be more than happy to provide the initial site
structure code and the application repository for example.

> I think we could come up with a way to use PHP and keep translatable
> stuff separate from the code at least. Like I mentioned in my email, I
> didn't even try to consider i18n. It sounds like Joakim has a bunch of
> changed cooked up anyways, so I'm sure what I wrote will get
> trashed...which is ok because I just want to get people actually working
> on it ;0)

The key thing is seperation while avoiding translation tables and the 
need for any code duplication.  Once you have that, the system should be 
pretty good.

-Shawn

--
Shawn T. Amundson                       amundson eventloop com	
Research and Development                http://www.eventloop.com/
EventLoop, Inc.                         (651) 999-0130

"The assumption that the universe looks the same in every
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