New releases of patTemplate and patForms :: a programmer's best friend

After I finally finished my book (and my contribution to Exploring PHP) I finally have enough time to work on all of my open source projects again and today made two new releases. patTemplate 3.1.0b1 contains tons of changes since the last stable version. Most of the features that users have been requesting for years have been incorporated into this release, like the possibility to read templates from a database:

$tmpl = new patTemplate();

$tmpl->setRoot('mysql://root:@localhost/test', 'DB');

$tmpl->readTemplatesFromInput("SELECT content FROM templates WHERE id='foo'", 'DB');

// or use this syntax:

$tmpl->readTemplatesFromInput('templates[@id=foo]/@content', 'DB');

It is now also possible to use any PHP function or method as a default value for a variable which allows you to prefill a value with the current timestamp. Furthermore I have been putting a lot of work into the new patTemplate manual.

patForms 0.9.0b3 mostly contains bugfixes and provides several install-groups for the PEAR installer, which allow you to choose your form renderer when installing patForms. This will hopefully be one of the last beta version for patForms 0.9.0 as we plan to release a stable version during the next 4-6 weeks.

Both packages can easily be installed using of PEAR channel server at pear.php-tools.net.