PHPTAL VS Latte

I agree and I don't fully understand the why of it.

I remember coding PL/SQL to emmit HTML in Oracle around 1999 or 2000 and using functions to code the various elements.

Thay got old and repetitive very quickly - for instqance, everytime I had to correct a spelling error, I had to recompile the code.

To get around it I used one or two tables to hold html snippets to decouple the business/backend logic from the frontend, and stopped using the PL/SQL functios completely.

My speed of developmet skyrocketed, and separating and abstracting the frontend from the backend made so much sense.

A few years later, I was doing web developemt with Python using the Zope framework (not many people know about it tiday, I think).

It uses a specialised serverside templating language called TAL (Template Attribute Language)[1] that basically builds the front end dynamically, and then you feed it data from the backend.

Very neat and allowed me to build reusable compoments as well as collections of a schema definition (basically a dict), html template(s) and the code to validate that the inpuy matched the schema and could be rendered.

Or something like that its been 2 employers and almost 20 years since i worked with tha :)

I did build a small php extension for Wordpress using a PHP implementation[2] of TAL a few years ago, and TAL still works like a charm :)

My point is that I still believe there is value in keeping python out of the HTMl-templating, and in keeping the front end logic apart from the backend logic.

There is something I am not understanding about the renewal of mixing HTML/GUI template with code, buy I haven't fully found it yet.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_Attribute_Language

[2] I believe it was this one https://phptal.org/

Have a look at Latte. It gives you a template engine that looks and feels a lot like PHP itself, rather than being a port of Python.

FTLOG, use a template engine. Do NOT use PHP itself as a template engine (ironic given its origins). The best are probably Twig (https://twig.symfony.com/) (used by Symfony and a few others) and Latte (https://latte.nette.org/) (less widely used, but its syntax is *way* more learnable as it's more like PHP itself).

You may have already used some of Nette's tools in other projects you've worked on and not known it! There is the very extendable Tracy for debugging similar to Whoosh, and Latte for intuitive HTML templating.

The target of the project is that more libraries / modules allow to use any Template engines the project want and see the more a as data provider. Also this kind of abstraction should make libraries e.g. a async mailer easier be integrated into different frameworks. A common usecase for myself is that Sulu CMS does not only support Twig but also other Template engines like example Latte which has interesting concept context aware escaping.

Nette is a PHP framework made by David Grudl and it is a great alternative to Symfony and Laravel. It has an amazing templating system called Latte that uses similar syntax to PHP and by default has context-sensitive escaping (which no other framework has). In my opinion, it is easier to learn, because it comes with a simple structure by default, it has no dependencies and less patterns to learn.

In the template file, we passed a variable called project containing a value into the extracted string mentioned before. All of this is done using an array as a second argument of the underscore tag notation. This is how this pairing works using latte templating engine and NEON. We've also used the noescape filter, which disables automatic escaping so the HTML tags are actually rendered and not printed as a text.

I'd heard great things about Timber, how do you like to use it? I recently wanted to add some templating to a WP2Static addon and went with Latte, I believe my reasoning at the time was for better PHPStan/static analysis support - I'm definitely not a power user of it, just simple templating for now.