[wp-hackers] Easytags template system

[Owen Winkler]

Matt Mullenweg wrote:
> Basically the concept is that it's very easy to parse something like 
> <$the_title$> into <?php the_title(); ?>. What if there was a plugin (or 
> in WP core) an option that gave you a "friendly" view when editing 
> templates? On display it could hide all the scary PHP it knows how to 
> parse behind psuedo-HTML tags, and on save turn it back into the PHP 
> that WordPress knows and love.

If you get creative, then you can parse something like <?php 
the_title(); ?> this same way.  There's no need for the p-code garbage. 
  Maybe importers could be extended to convert themes?  This would make 
sense of keeping them around after their initial job is done.

Having implemented the proposed functionality already under HTMLArea for 
a different project, I can attest that it's more trouble than it's worth 
to come up with artificial loop constructs.  Nevermind that their 
implementation is never as good as the real thing, but then the obscure 
syntaxes need to be documented - something that the WordPress community 
has thus far struggled to maintain even with its current set of stable 
PHP-based template tags.

There is a large body of other arguments against easytags and for native 
code.  I'm omitting those here to prevent myself from imploding.

Finally, the flexible templating feature as described is way outside the 
scope of what I would personally care for WordPress to ever do for me, 
since the majority of existing WordPress templates rock the socks off of 
anything I could steal from MT/wherever and rolling custom PHP is better 
than anything that could be done with p-code.

When Mike Rundle says "that could just be the opinion of somebody used 
to how MT does things, so take with a grain of salt", that's pretty much 
what I see going on here.

Owen