Drupal has awesome features to manage your content structure without writing a line of code. Content management is amazingly flexible.
Then, when it comes to design, YOU HAVE TO CODE A LOT. What the...? So you manage content without coding and you have to code for the design? You open the templates with Dreamweaver and find just php tag after php tag. Sorry to say this, but giving official support for phpTemplate and reject Smarty as the default template engine is a big big mistake for me. Everything is full of "print" instructions. What the ....???? How easy was in Smarty, just insert the variable name between brackets, the engine does the rest.
In the Garland page template we find stuff like this:
<?php
if ($breadcrumb): print $breadcrumb; endif;
?>while in Smarty it should be just like:
{$breadcrumb}
If $breadcrumb does not exist, it's not printed. It's WAY MUCH simpler.
Smarty has also features to traverse arrays, make loops, and call custom or PHP default functions. And the templates look "human readable" in Dreamweaver. And you can define your own functions too.
Then... why phpTemplate?
Comments
Educate yourself by reading
Educate yourself by reading this page: http://drupal.org/node/7133
and then if you are interested, rad this page: http://drupal.org/node/7133
Sometimes something interesting appears on http://litwol.com
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smarty is available for Drupal in the downloads area if that is what you prefer.
Yes, I saw this, thank you,
Yes, I saw this, thank you, but it seems there is no Smarty for Drupal 5. Besides, they seem not recommended for production sites.
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There happens to be a patch for Smarty for Drupal 5 in the issues query that a few people were working on. Don't know how far they've gotten.
I was also wondering about
I was also wondering about this one... I am used to Smarty in my previous projects, and one important aspect of Smarty is CACHING, which big Drupal sites need a lot. Smarty is not just a template engine, it's a complete framework for developing fast webappps.
Drupal has multiple levels
Drupal has multiple levels of caching that speeds performance greatly! why dong you elaborate more regarding your 'lack of caching' statement, what part of caching exactly do you need that is missing from Drupal?
Sometimes something interesting appears on http://litwol.com
DB caching is not the way to
DB caching is not the way to go.... Isn't php caching all about skipping database calls if page content hasn't been changed? Does Drupal have that feature for authenticated users?
Not at the moment, drupal
Not at the moment, drupal caches by building page once, and storing it in the database so instead of executing 200+ queries for a single page, it executes only a handful.
currently there is no system that caches pages onto a filesystem or into HTML. a module for that would be nice.
Sometimes something interesting appears on http://litwol.com
that would be difficult
that would be difficult since html caching is "all or nothing" type of caching.... It could be done if all authenticated users see same things when they log in. BUT it's a little bit harder if you have a lot of custom blocks that display data according to currently logged in user, like control-panel block with logged in user data, avatar, etc...
Althought I am really interested in something like this for Drupal.
building pages like this
building pages like this shouldnt be difficult: [page-url-or-path-alias]-[$user-uid].html
first access: check if file exist, go to 'third access' if it does
second access: build the page and file cache it
third access: serve the cached file
Sometimes something interesting appears on http://litwol.com
I just had a thought on this
We should be able to implement a block-level ajax refresh of page elements. So the page as a whole can be displayed, and then the blocks can flash in on updates.
javascript tools try this:
javascript tools
try this: http://drupal.org/project/jstools
Sometimes something interesting appears on http://litwol.com