VTE in general

What's behind Vivvo?

Vivvo Template Engine was developed as a template engine for Vivvo CMS. Our main goal in design and development was to create a template engine that would be light-weight and easy to use, yet powerful and scalable. And of course high-performance, which is a must. The template engine that can do recursions, object calls, arrays, but still remain within a single class in less than 1000 lines of code! The main problem with many robust template engines (like Smarty) is that most developers use barely 20% of their power and that's exactly why our goal was quite the opposite - a template engine that most web applications will drive at 90% of its speed with a minimal learning curve.

Engine

VTE denotes two things: key component of Vivvo framework and Vivvo Template Engine (XML) language namespace. One might treat VTE language (in futher text VTEl) as simplified procedural language introduced to achieve complete separation of presentation layer and business logic. VTEl should be your major tool in customizing your Vivvo feel and functionality (for look please use CSS). VTE uses context scope chain, meaning that when searching for variable value VTE starts from current leaf and goes down to the root. For module loading VTE relies on Vivvo configuration table, so every module must be registered before it can be used.

VTE language

VTE language is XML-based and it consists of tags and attributes. It uses VTE namespace and can be mixed with any other XML language (i.e. xHTML). Each VTE template must be a valid XML document.

Each VTE template must be well formated XML document, and it must not contain XML heading and doctype (issue with expat on some PHP versions)

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