Collecting my attempts to improve at tech, art, and life

PageTemplate

Tags: pagetemplate coolnamehere

WARNING

Haven’t touched PageTemplate in ages. This stuff is only here for the historical record.

Introduction

PageTemplate was a Ruby package which allowed you to utilize text templates for your Web projects. It was mainly intended for use in a CGI environment, but designed to be helpful in a broad range of similar applications. It was inspired by, yet almost entirely unlike, the HTML::Template package available for Perl. It has many features in common with other templating engines:

It also has a few features of its own (otherwise, where’s the fun?).

More features were planned, such as support for localization to allow native-language markup. But life had other demands, and I never did get back to PageTemplate.

Let’s go back to 2002 present-tense verb usage while I decide what to do with these pages.

What PageTemplate Is Not

Motivation

Brian has been a fan of Perl’s HTML::Template package for a long time, and he missed its robust usefulness whenever using a language that isn’t Perl. After delving deeper into other languages, he thought it might be fun to make some of that utility available in Ruby. It would give Brian a decent-sized personal project, which would stretch his skills with project development and unit testing. Plus, if a templating system was available, maybe he wouldn’t miss Perl so badly.

So those were the primary motivations: personal education and homesickness.

Once the code started taking shape, though, he decided that he wanted this to be useful for other people. “Download and use” kind of useful. Greg Millam found PageTemplate to be so useful that he opted to join in the development process and add loads of new features. PageTemplate has continued to be used by a small but apparently loyal group of people, despite Brian and Greg’s periodic hibernation. The continued contributions of Greg Millam have made PageTemplate a powerful tool for Web development rather than the mild distraction it started out as.

Using PageTemplate

First, you’ll want to download and install the latest version of PageTemplate. Then, designers will make templates, programmers will write code, and some of us will do both. Eventually, you will probably get tired of the default syntax, and want to make your own. If you’re an especially geeky sort of person, you’ll no doubt want to look at the source for lasses and methods that are available in the PageTemplate package.

Most importantly, enjoy yourself! PageTemplate is supposed to be good geeky fun, not hard work with lots of sweat and turmoil!

Users

I would love to hear about what you’ve done with PageTemplate. Until then, I’ll be forced to look PageTemplate up on Google and see what I find:

The License

PageTemplate is distributed under The MIT License, which is detailed below.

The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2002-2006 Brian Wisti, Greg Millam

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Changelog


Added to vault 2024-01-15. Updated on 2024-02-01