Ugling: the start of the template engine

The changes

If you look at the previous build.xml file you know processing content in phing will turn in spaghetti code very soon. So I moved it to the template task.

The new build.xml file is easy to read because now you just have two tasks.

To get the build result I want i needed to add an attribute to the markdown task, removefilesetdir.
For me it was a cleaner way to process the markdown files and add the processed files to another directory than the way the rSTTask documentation shows.

The template engine vision

I want working with the generator to be as easy as possible so I try to stay away from code-like constructions as much as possible.
But at the same time it has to be as flexible as possible too.

The first problem I encounter is how can I provide a default template but allow specific templates at the same time.

Because i started to work with base template I got the idea that each directory could have a template.html that wraps all files in that directory and its subdirectories.
The only exception is the root template directory, it's required to have a template.html there.

To allow file specific templates it seemed the most logical to use the name of the file, so if your content file is called test.md and you want a file template you create a test.html file in the templates directory.

The template task today

I took my MarkdownTask.php code to start the TemplateTask.php code.
I concentrated on getting it to work so the code isn't that clean yet.

The default template code is working.

To prevent placeholders showing up in the online files they are set to an empty string before the actual content is added or generated.

Next time

The next blog post I will have the template vision working and have come up with a plan to add generated navigation content.