Pattern Skin Using Template Toolkit

To explore benefits offered by Template Toolkit, here is an effort to use TT2 to render the topics.

• TT2Templates-0.1.tar.gz: Pattern skin using TT2 Templates

It currently only loads and processes the tt2 template file for view. The pattern skin has been converted to TT2 format. TMPL:DEF's are converted into TT2 BLOCKs.

The algorithm is roughly:

• Load the standard template - in this case ttview.pattern.tmpl
• Some standard replacements as per original code (such as REV's).
• Instantiate and process it as TT2 template. This step requires set of values to be passed to the TT2 engine - so they are available for use within the templates. For e.g. [% web %] will be replaced with name of the web. (These are equivalent to twiki variables.) Only a sample list of variables in currently provided; but none are used in pattern skin.
• Finally pass it on to standard renderer which replaces common tags and twiki variables.

From included README:

$ cat TT2Templates.README
This is an experimental version to use Template Toolkit in lieu of the main templating system that twiki supports today.

What has been done:
 - Convert pattern skin view template  (view.pattern.tmpl) to Template toolkit template: ttview.pattern.tmpl. (For loading these templates, existing mechanism is used.)
 - For now, in lieu of TMPL:INCLUDE capability, the files are directly inserted. Therefore, we include converted 'twiki.tmpl' in ttview.pattern.tmpl.
 - A new 'view' called 'ttview', that in turn uses a new lib/TWiki/UI/TTView.pm is used.

To install:
 - Untar it somewhere, copy the files to relevant locations
 - Default twiki setup is not affected unless configuration changes as made as suggested below.


To test it for single topic: Directly use 'ttview' in place of 'view' in the URL of topic.

To use it for all topics by default:
 - Change $dispViewPath definition to "/ttview".

Note: You need to install Template toolkit first. (http://www.template-toolkit.org/)

-- VinodKulkarni - 20 Mar 2005

Very interesting, Vinod.

Any sense of the relative performance of TT wrt TWiki's system?

-- MartinCleaver - 20 Mar 2005

I am out of touch w.r.t. performance measurement setup. But because it is a drop-in replacement, it should be easy to compare... Let us hear from community.

-- VinodKulkarni - 20 Mar 2005