Felipe Sanches wrote:
Hi, wikitech-l! I am interested in using a Template language in mediawiki extensions. I ve been learning PHPTAL, but It seems to me that it was used in mw someday in the past and is not used anymore... am I wrong?
We used PHPTAL for the MonoBook skin in MediaWiki 1.3, but later converted it to a custom PHP class. The problems with PHPTAL were basically:
1) It requires compiling the template to a PHP file. This PHP file gets stored in a global temporary directory and is writable to the web server -- there were very frequent failures on systems with restricted permissions, and it made the wiki extra vulnerable to partially compromised servers. (For instance, a worm that struck shared servers running some unrelated insecure web application would find the compiled MonoBook template and overwrite it with a "your server has been hacked" message.)
2) The original version of PHPTAL worked only on PHP 4, and a rewritten version was being worked on for PHP 5. They were not quite compatible with each other, requiring a lot of hacks to work consistently at the time.
3) Not having to bundle two external bits of software is kind of nice.
What options do I have, then?
Whatever works for you. PHPTAL, Smarty, roll your own...
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)