[geeklog-modules] Re: Fortune Plugin and GL2

[Tom Willett]

> Well, the first question I would have is it that important to support more 
> than one template library? (i.e. is that really a requirement).

No that is not a requirement, but I have found that designing in flexibility 
and encapsulating things in objects always ends up better in the long run, 
even though it takes a little more design work at the beginning.  

The exchangability of template engines could have two plusses.  1)  If a 
particular app you wanted to integrate GL2 with used a different template 
engine, you could swap out GL2s engine.  2)  What if 2 years down the road 
(or God forbid, just before the intial release of GL2) some new whizbang 
template engine comes along, we could change it out with little difficulty.

One big advantage that I see to making as much as possible oo is that it 
will be easy to create high level generic classes that plugin developers can 
extend as needed.  With a template factory, we could even make generic 
templates, customizable through code for such things as Admin pages.

> I haven't had a chance to think completely through this yet.  I can say 
that 
> we've decided not to use PHPLib's library but, rather, the 
> PEAR::HTML_Template_IT. I will say the layout flexibility that we've all 
> talked about over the past year or so will definitely test the limits of 
> any template package we pick.
> 
> 
> Speaking of all this, check this out:
> 
> http://phrame.itsd.ttu.edu/
> 

I have not seen this, looks interesting.  I will be on the road this weekend 
and into next week, I will try to look at it then.

--
Tom Willett
tomw at pigstye.net