Template-Plain version 1.00
===========================
I know, I know. Another templating module? Why? Don't we have enough of those
already?
But wait! This one may just be the wheel you've all been reinventing because
available templating systems were overkill for what you needed, had a few too
many dependencies, had a learning curve that was a little too steep, or were
just too bloated.
Template::Plain doesn't have a dozen different delimiters or its own mini-
language to learn. If it weren't for its test suite, it'd have no dependencies
at all. And, though it's claimed compatibility is only back to 5.6.0, it should
be compatible with early 5.0 versions if 'use warnings' were removed and its
$VERSION variable were declared with 'use vars' instead of 'our'.
Template::Plain is nearly braindead in its simplicity. You create templates
with some delimited tags, tell Template::Plain what to replace those tags with,
and that's pretty much it. Oh, it might have a bell or a whistle, but probably
not more than one of each.
One feature that's really quite handy is it's way of determining where to get
the content for the template. Of course, you can pass it explicitly. But when
you don't, Template::Plain looks for it in a couple places. First it looks in
the DATA section of the calling package. If not there, it tries the DATA
section of the main package. And, if not there, it falls back to the ARGV file
handle. It takes very little imagination to come up with some good uses for
this behavior.
Template::Plain allows the filling of place holders with the result returned
by some code or the contents of an array (you can specify the output
delimiter.) It also allows you to change the delimiters for the placeholders
and to recursively fill templates. This feature is rarely used but quite
powerful.
I have been using a version of this module--well more like an exact copy
except for its name and documentation--for many years now. I released it once
in a post on Perlmonks.org but never put it up on CPAN. I don't know why not.
It's one of my personal goto modules and, hands down, one of the most
generally useful modules I've ever written.
Please enjoy!
Jeremy Madea <jeremy@cpan.org>
INSTALLATION
To install this module type the following:
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
DEPENDENCIES
This module requires Test::More for testing only.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE
Copyright (C) 2012 by Jeremy Madea
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.6.0 or,
at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.