wp-sqlite-db VS Latte

Before they added SQLite as WP plugin, I would use https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db/ and I would use `define('DB_DIR', '/absolute/custom/path/to/directory/for/sqlite/database/file/');` to define the database location of my choice; I believe they would let users do the same with core support.

They basically took this implementation and just adapted it to coding standards:

https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db

This has been around since some time and is itself a fork of a previous work.

The interesting part is that this drop-in replacement (mostly) already works well, there are a few issues that are related to some quirks in the WordPress core itself, for example: https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db/issues/18

And maybe now they will be fixed.

Author here, here's an in-depth writeup on how this works and why it's useful:

https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/09/23/client-side-webas...

To answer your questions directly:

WebAssembly is the magic sauce that transforms server-side code into client-side code. MySQL unfortunately is not yet supported by WebAssembly, so I applied a plugin that adds SQLite supports to WordPress [0]. The WebAssembly application has its own in-memory filesystem that lives in a specific browser tab and is scraped as soon as you close it.

So – technically it exposes db credentials, and even the entire DB, but that you are the only user of that DB so it's okay.

> What would the backend look like

The only backend is a static file server where the code and the database live. Your browser downloads a copy of the database and allows you to modify it in the current tab, but the updates are never saved back to the server.

[0] https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db

1. Plugins that register their own database tables (however there already exists prior art such as https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db for handling these cases)

2. Plugins that do direct queries against the standard database schema (broadly either for invalid (bad code) or performance (valid but slim use case) reasons)

Also, WordPress would of course keep the old query functions around and they would likely add a tag to the plugin repository so authors can mark plugins as supporting thes new ORM features.

Great idea in my opinion!

There's a WordPress plugin that adds support for SQLite as an alternative to MySQL.

Apparently it works really well. The implementation is (to my) simply astonishing: they run regular expressions against the SQL to convert it from MySQL dialect to SQLite! https://github.com/aaemnnosttv/wp-sqlite-db/blob/9a5604cce13...

This wp-sqlite-db one. Not super active, but maintained, at least.

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.