Classy web templates - take two

2005-05-29

A while ago I wrote a piece called Classy web templates which is a minor source of incoming traffic from search engines, although I don't think the people arriving here are going to be all that impressed - they probably meant classy as in classy, not classy as in uses the class attribute to identify areas for replacement or content-substitution in a web templating system based on ordinary web pages functioning as templates. Poor things.

I still think that my approach is classy, though. The idea is that you express the template for a site (or part thereof) in plain old HTML, with some example content, and simply mark the variable parts with a class attribute. No fancy extra syntax, and definately no PHP or ASP style embedded code.

I have now put the code for 'classy web templates' into a new bit of Python code that's available at trac.officecontent.net, as part of the sitemap class. The tests use py.test. Not much in the way of documentation yet. You can use the sitemap as an ultra-simple template system in any application, or take advantage some extra functionality that lets you manage the presentation of a site driven by path-like URLS. More on the sitemap part later.