smartpy is cool ... but hypy is hype ;-)

History

Few years ago, i've discovered Smarty for php, and was totally amazed by all the concepts of this templating engine.
With python, i had never found a templating engine as powerful as smarty. In the fabulous python world, there are a lot of engines (quixote, kid, cheetah, cherrytemplate, tal, ptp, simpletal ...), but no one comes with all the simple and good concepts that i've found in smarty.
So i decided to build my own simple smarty-like template engine, which i named smartpy.

Features

Smartpy do :

implement some template "blocks command" (foreach, if/else, capture, include)
implement the concept of "modifiers command" (and "functions command" too)
plugins (really easy to add its own block/function/modifiers command)

Smartpy doesn't do :

caching engine (but it should be easy to implement)
doesn't "compile" template
not fully compatible with the real smarty

Compare to

Smartpy compares to all others python template engines (the first 2 points are the most important):

a simple, very simple, template engine (1 module of 250 lines of code : easy to hack if needed, or easy to transpose to another language)
very easy to add its own "block/function/modifiers" as plugins
implement only the minimum commands (with them, you can do all)
is not xml-oriented or attribut-oriented, you can template all kinds of strings
templates are not obscufated with python code or complex syntax ! Smart[p]y language is simple and doesn't break the html code in a wysiwyg editor.

Download

Download SmartPy (GPL)

Documentation

Look a test.py file (in the tar.gz):
- it implements some "user plugins" (herits from Plugins)
- and use a test template, with all features covered

Marc - 11 / 01 / 2006