Goals

But don’t forget the aim of the project, IT2 should:

• Simple
• Easy to use
• API compatible to HTML_Template_IT
• Fast

Therefore I won’t implement caching like HTML_Template_Sigma does nor won’t I implement complex control structures like Smarty does.
At the moment I write the the initial code. I will drop a few deprecated things from HTML_Template_IT, but I try to support nearly 100% API compatibility.

Ideas

As a new feature, there will be a setter/getter structure for attributes and blocks. I discovered this idea seeing jTemplate by Johannes Schlueter.
[php]
$html->BLOCKNAME->VAR = ‘Hello’;
$html->BLOCKNAME->parse();[/php] Another idea for the extended version of IT – IT[X] – will be local settings for each block like:

// CONTENT

But thats at the moment just an idea. Another goal is for sure a speedup. My initial code is approx. 20% faster then the old code.

Roadmap / The old version

I hope to get the first version if HTML_Template_IT2 done until november. The PHP4 version – HTML_Template_IT – will therefore only be maintained until end of this year. From 01.01.2008 on, with the end of life for PHP4, I will stop working on the old version. If you want to maintain the old branch from then, please contact me.

You can get the current status of HTML_Template_IT2 from my git repository and I encourage you to send patches if you have good ideas.

Thorsten joined me to prepare a new PHP5 Strict compatible version of IT[X]. I’m looking forward to work with him and start preparing a slightly modified API and requesting for comments, hopefully this month.