WIP: XSlate templating #364
Conversation
…h Xslate templates
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It's been two years. Are these still relevant? |
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I haven't been following this project too closely but I understand the situation regarding generation of HTML hasn't changed (still a mix of citations and Perl code). Also the points from #301 still seem relevant and correct (to me), e.g., better separation of rendering concerns and data/object wrangling, and unifying rendering methods. So it still seems like an area of eprints that could be improved and I'd hoped that this proof of concept would help to demonstrate that but I have to leave it to you and the active community to judge whether it would have any real value. |
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I personally think that it is relevant, as demonstrated in #301. But why Xslate? it seems quite dead compared to other templates (tt2 for example, or even html::template). |
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Why Xslate? There were a handful of templating libraries available at the time, this one had nice features and claimed good performance. Nothing special in other words! I don't think it's terribly important that this PR uses an unpopular/unsupported templating system, it could be swapped for another easily - the point was really to demonstrate that one could be integrated without breaking existing rendering code for a smooth transition to the new system and that using the template system made it much nicer to write the rendering for screen plugins and improved the code. |
This is a proof-of-concept for unifying EPrints UI code generation in a templating system, using Text::Xslate. It works for citations, plugins and templates. There's some discussion of MVC and templating going on in #301 so I thought I would (finally!) make a PR of this in case it helped the discussion
My approach was to make the minimal changes required to support a template system and to ensure that it could work alongside existing templating, so that migration of all of core code isn't required to adopt the new templating.
I've included eprints citations, a default template and a version of the Manage Eprints page to demonstrate how it works in practice.