On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 6:43 PM, Thomas Daltonthomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
There is no proposal to replace wikitext with PHP (it wouldn't even work, PHP isn't a markup language, ditto Javascript, Python, etc.), the proposal is to replace the template code, ie. the code on the template pages.
The OP does not say it is a recommendation to replace ParserFunctions, it says, "our current templating system." In my mind that absolutely includes the use of templates in the article namespace.
There are lots of usability improvements that can be made to the templating system. First and foremost the new system should allow advanced wiki users to perform programmatic operations on article data without the requirement that the data in the article be made unreadable.
If we only focus our efforts on making the template namespace more complicated by giving it a more advanced programming language and we leave the article namespace as it is then we have not even touched the usability issue. We have just made it worse.
I do of course have some specific ideas about how to achieve this goal, but I'm kind of in "shock and awe" that it's not seen as the main reason for improving the template system!