[[!tag wishlist]]
HTML::Template is an okay templating kit, but it lacks a lot of powerful
features and thus makes it rather hard to give an ikiwiki site a consistent
look. If you browse the templates provided in the tarball, you'll notice that
more than one of them contain the `` tag, which is unnecessary.
Maybe it's just me, I also find HTML::Template cumbersome to use, due in part
to its use of capital letters.
Finally, the software seems unmaintained: the mailing list and searchable
archives linked from
are broken and the author has not replied to my query in months.
I would love to see ikiwiki use the [Template
Toolkit](http://template-toolkit.org/) as templating engine.
One major reason for TT is its use of slots, a concept I first encountered
with Zope Page Templates and never wanted to miss it again. Let me quickly
illustrate, using the HTML::Template syntax for simplicity. Traditionally,
templating is done with includes:
Page A Page B
this is page A this is page B
This involves four pages, and if you mistype "footer" on page B,
it'll be broken in potentially subtle ways.
Now look at the approach with slots:
MainTemplate
This is the header
This is the footer
Page A Page B
This is page A This is page B
As soon as you think about more structure pages with various slots
to fill, I am sure you can see the appeal of that approach. If not,
here is some more documentation:
I would be glad to volunteer time to make this switch happen, such as rewrite
the templates. I'd prefer not having to touch Perl though...
-----
Yes, Template::Toolkit is very powerful. But I think it's somehow overkill for a wiki. HTML::Template can keep things simple, though. --[weakish](http://weakish.int.eu.org/blog/)
I'd have to agree that Template::Toolkit is overkill and personally I'm not a fan, but it is very popular (there is even a book) and the new version (3) is alleged to be much more nimble than current version. --[[ajt]]
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