My developer site was, until now, using PHP on my local system to build the XHTML pages starting from some XML files. This was a bit of a problem as PHP is… a mess.
Edit: just to clarify, I think PHP is a mess for two reasons: a) php can be great to add simple dynamic contents to a page, but it’s not so suited for CLI usage to create a series of static pages b) the XML parsing code IS messy if you don’t use simplexml, and simplexml requires PHP5, and still it had a couple of problems with my content, and I had to quote its content into a <[CDATA[ section to get it right.
By the way, the time needed to recreate all the site with the same content is way less using xslt than continuing PHP-parse the XML datafiles to get the output xhtml files. :tidE
Being working lately with ProjectXML and GuideXML files in bsd project pages, I though of looking at the xslt pages to do a similar work.
The result is that I reworked a bit my XML datafiles to aggregate the data without using two-stage xml files, and then wrote a series of XSL files to translate them to XML with xsltproc…
No changes on the site, but now is way simpler and faster for me to add a new release of a project, or add a news, or whatever else 🙂
I’ll probably release a copy of the sources soon, in the mean time if someone wants to look at them, just mail me and I’ll send you 🙂
emerge unmerge php …