I hope everyone had a pleasant and relaxing holiday weekend. The more I look at the different templating systems the more I’m leaning toward Smarty. When cached, it’s just about the fastest thing out there. It’s certainly flexible enough for pretty much anything we could want to do, and its support and community are really unmatched. Although the research has brought be full circle, I feel much better knowing that all the options have been examined. Note this is not a final decision, merely the results of my search. Besides, a new template system is at least another point release away. 😉

Here are the aforementioned template options I’ve come across, in no particular order:

• Tiny But Strong
• Template Power
• SmarTemplates Engine
• PHP Service
• Ultra Template
• PHPTMPL
• PHP-Templates
• Awesome Template Engine
• Phite
• SimpleTemplate
• patTemplate
• HTML Template
• Phemplate
• Fast Template
• Cached Fast Template
• Enzyme
• PHP Guru Template Class
• Smarty
• SmartTemplate

I narrowed it down quite a bit, not in any sort of qualitative way but simply through out-of-date links. This brings to mind the importance of a good name, which most of these lack, and I think WordPress is quick lucky in that respect. Now if only we could hit the top of Google on a search for our name. Update: Well that wasn’t hard.

Okay I’ve scoured the net and found about 35 different templating implementations. Some look quite promising, but it’ll take me a while to narrow it down to a few and start some serious testing. I would like to say for the record that HotScripts has what is possibly the worst search I have used in the past five years. I found some of the most relevant results on the twenty-forth page. Of course the fact I made it that far should show you my dedication to this project. 😉

I’ve been looking and playing a lot with Smarty and SmartTemplate, trying to get a feel for each and decide which (if either) WordPress should go with. Neither is really right for the job; Smarty does far too much, while SmartTemplate is clunky in comparison and execution. SmartTemplate is ridiculously fast, but the syntax is so painful I wouldn’t want to subject it on anyone. Smarty does have a very strong community, and I’ve been lurking on their lists for several months now, but it seems like the community is headed in a different direction than I’d like to take WordPress; Smarty becomes more and more complicated with each release. If there are any other alternatives, I’d love to hear about them. I’m leaning toward Smarty, but with a number of reservations. Time will tell.

A small computer crisis has caused me to lose a couple of days of work on WordPress, but never fear, redoing something is always quicker than doing it the first time. More frequent check-ins to the CVS in the future will be a must.

The major enhancements for the .7 release have been outlined in the future section. The features we’ve chosen to focus on for this first release may seem trivial, but in fact each represents major groundwork being laid for future enhancements to WordPress, as well as items that will add significant value to users.

There will be a beta of this release available perhaps as much as a week prior to the full release, but the only way you’ll hear of it is if you’re on the announcement list. To sign up simply use the form at the bottom of any page. Thank you all for your interest.

Thanks to Christine for the links on Scriptygoddess and Big Pink Cookie. Christine is a MT user but has been a strong supporter from day 0, she’s even on the about page

In other news the embarrassing validation errors have been taken care of. There might still be some pages on the support forums that I need to clean up, but the rest of the site should be good. Don’t be too shy to drop me an email if you notice a mistake.

The look around here should be a little more respectable now, though there is still a long way to go, espescially with this blog. To get it where I’d like though I want to modify code and I want this to run on an unmodified version of WordPress as much as possible, so polish will come incrementally and in line with CVS commits.

The about page has been updated, and the support forum is no longer formatting things oddly.

Cleaned up the email notification of comments with a number of features that should make it more useful. First, the comments now appear to come from the email address of the person who left the comment, so if they filled it in you can just click reply in your email client to respond privately. Second, the name of blog is now in the subject, which should be very useful for those who run multiple blogs. Third, slashes are now stripped from the email subject. Finally, the message text has been cleaned up with capitalization, the name of the post, a real link to the comments (using comments_link), and a handy whois link. I also started the tedious process of fixing the template functions so they don’t necessarily echo out, they can return as well.

Welcome to the WordPress development blog. Run by WordPress itself, it will catalog what’s happening with the development. Think of it like a changelog with comments, permalinks, archives…