CyberKnet's Journal: Phemplate ... where are you?

PHP is nice. It's not so nice that I would throw away all the other languages I know, but it's nice enough that I have transferred over my previously perl/cgi website to it. I'd like it a lot better if I could force variable declaration, but on the whole it's pretty good.

I have tried to use Smarty and a bunch of other templating engines. I gave up on them all and was *just* about to create a new one when I ran across Phemplate. It was crude, but reasonably fast, and had a moderate feature base. I fell in love with it, and have been using it ever since. Anyone out there, if you're looking, Phemplate is awesome.

Back to the point ... I've been using Phemplate for over a year now, and I still really like it. But more over, I've started modifying it. I've added conditions, ability to show loop iterations, and modified their loop implementation to allow recursive loops. It doesn't look like that big of a list, but I felt like it was pretty modest. I also felt other people would like those features, especially the conditions.

So I sent it to the author, given that it's distributed under the GPL, I thought they would like my contributions back. That was about half a year ago, and I never heard back save for a "I'll look at this in a week or so".

Should I continue to submit the changes? I really feel like the recursive loops thing is a big hit. It works really well for me, and I can't see how nobody would have asked for it before... The trouble is that I'm still working from an ancient version of Phemplate, and I think the author is having difficulty patching my changes in. I don't want to have to rework all my changes into the current version, so I kind of understand this too.

I might just have to start making the source code available to everyone.

Okay, so it's time for another quote.... here we go:

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self. - Mary Sarton