/SmallTAL

A php template engine based on TAL

Primary LanguagePHP

SmallTAL

A php template engine based on TAL, an attribute-based template engine.

There is at least two other php tal implementation (PHPTAL, for example), but this implementation was written thinking about size and speed; tal templates are converted into php code (without the inner data), allowing to reuse them without the need of future conversion. Each time a template is requested, if the template/metal file/smalltal source was modified after the template compilation, the library recompile the template into php code. The template engine isn't an html parser/beautifier, so won't correct your template.

It's licensed under a BSD-like license.

Using

To use SmallTAL you need to do:

  1. Create a temp directory, a cache directory and a template directory

  2. Template directory should have this structure: | Templates +-- TemplateName.metal.html < macros for the template +--| TemplateName +-- PageName.html

  3. Use the library in your project, for example:

include( 'SmallTAL.php' ); $data_required_by_the_template = array ( 'variabile' => 'a value', 'arrayVariable' => array ( 'some data', 'some other data' ) ); $smallTALpaths = array ( 'temp' => '/path/to/temp/directory', 'template' => '/path/to/the/template/directory', 'cache' => '/path/where/cache/file/will/be/stored' );

$returnValue = SmallTAL( "TemplateName", "PageName", $data_required_by_the_template, $smallTALpaths );

If you want to obtain the template in a variable, you should use ob_start()/ob_get_clean().

You can look the SmallTAL.Tests.php (it's a PHPUnit test case) file and/or the tests folder.

Unsupported TAL/TALES features

This is a minimal TAL template engine, optional features isn't supported. Also on-error isn't supported.

Usefull links

TAL specification: http://wiki.zope.org/ZPT/TALSpecification14 TALES specification: http://wiki.zope.org/ZPT/TALESSpecification13 METAL specification: http://wiki.zope.org/ZPT/METALSpecification10 Owlfish TAL, TALES and METAL reference: http://www.owlfish.com/software/simpleTAL/tal-guide.html