Beginning of the Blog
2005.10.02 22:27
For those not in the know, development of Templation began 5 years ago when I was working fulltime to expand a content-driven website at the University of Minnesota. The nature of the site required agile web design. Traditional content management systems of the time seemed too expensive, too cumbersome or both. Nevertheless I would find myself writing Perl scripts to make global changes on 200 static HTML files.
I came to the conclusion that I needed a templating system, not a content management system. Dreamweaver templates looked promising but ultimately were far too restrictive and locked me into a workflow I didn't like. On the server-side Smarty and other template languages required writing a lot of code just to output a simple template; not agile enough. If I was going to go to all that trouble why not just write it all in PHP?
I kept thinking, "Why do I have to all this work to use a template? Can't I just specify templates for a whole website and get my content inserted automatically?"
In the first iteration, Templation was actually invoked using mod_rewrite, so that it could be applied directly to static HTML files. The engine would pull the contents of the head and body tags and insert them into a template specified in one of the ancestor directories. Over the years the core concept has proven very useful with only incremental changes made to the code base.
But this past year I decided to really pull out the stops and make Templation ready for a wider audience. The code has been rewritten as a PEAR subclass (mainly for better error-handling) with vast improvements made to the installation process. The documentation came just this past summer as my graduating project for a BS in Computer Science. This most recent effort has shown me many flaws to fix, and given me dozens of great ideas to make Templation even more useful.
This blog is the replacement to the defunct Development News mailing list. Here is your opportunity to find out what's in the hopper and make your voice heard about the future direction of Templation development.
