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[[!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 `<html>` 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
<http://html-template.sourceforge.net/html_template.html#frequently%20asked%20questions>
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
<TMPL_INCLUDE header> <TMPL_INCLUDE header>
this is page A this is page B
<TMPL_INCLUDE footer> <TMPL_INCLUDE footer>
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
<TMPL_SLOT content>
This is the footer
Page A Page B
<TMPL_USE MainTemplate> <TMPL_USE MainTemplate>
<TMPL_FILL content> <TMPL_FILL content>
This is page A This is page B
</TMPL_FILL> </TMPL_FILL>
</TMPL_USE> </TMPL_USE>
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: <http://wiki.zope.org/ZPT/METALSpecification11>
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/)
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