Open Power Template is a quite old project, lasting for almost five years now. The development started in November 2004, as a small template engine for the open-source discussion board project called Open Power Board. The library was a creative variation of the Smarty engine, and I was the right person in the team to write it, as I was writing small template engines much earlier and had some experience in this area. Fortunately or not, the OpenPB project failed and my library was the only which survived the crash. After some huge code revisions, I released the first stable version, 1.0.0 in July 2006, three years ago. At the first sight, the template engine was quite similar to Smarty, especially because it used curly brackets, too. However, we could find there some ideas that were later improved and featured in the 2.0 branch. OPT 1.0.0 contained:

• Sections
• Components
• Snippets (under different name)
• I18n support

The 1.1 branch brought the pagination support and tree rendering instruction. The template engine did not understand the document structure, but the parser used some ideas taken from XML parsers. For example, it constructed a node tree for the content similar to DOM, and the nodes were instruction tags and the text content. Furthermore, there was a feature called XML Compatibility Mode which replaced the curly brackets with XML-like instruction delimiters. However, this was only a visual change.

Early in 2007, after some talks with the users, I started thinking about using a real XML parser in Open Power Template. On my blog, I published a note dated to April 19, where I suggested that a compiler with an XML parser could be written, as an extra compiler for the project. It did not mean that the works began then, as I was beginning my studies on AGH University in Cracow and had little time to deal with it, too. The first lines of code were written about seven months later, in November. On November 23, I wrote on my blog that the parser loaded the first XML document into memory, and a couple of days later it compiled its first (very simple) template.

OPT was a really productive project. Soon, I realized, that the old infrastructure from OpenPB used so far is crappy and unreliable which led to the formation of Invenzzia Group in January. You may ask where the name came from. We were thinking about it very long, and the further, the more stupid ideas were coming into our minds. As I was fascinated with linguistics and artifical (constructed) languages, we opened the dictionary of one of my languages, Ferrinti with the word: invenzzia - invention. By the way, it has nothing to do with Polish language, where the word for invention is wynalazek and inwencja means something completely different.

A couple of months later, I was becoming more and more annoyed with DocBook, especially because of the lack of any simple-in-use framework for generating user manuals and documentations from them. Because I did not want to deal with various XML parsers, incompatibility issues between Windows, Linux and everything else, I decided to write a completely new tool in PHP. This was the second project inspired by Open Power Template and it is known now as TypeFriendly. At the same time, we closed the 1.1 branch of OPT, to focus on the other projects. In July, the branch was actually rewritten from scratch, introducing a completely new API that had nothing to do with the earlier versions, as it was using many new features, such as autoloading, or better use of exceptions. Furthermore, I removed the explicit recursion from the compiler that produced very serious trouble due to the PHP stack limitations. Precisely after a year, on November 23, 2008, Invenzzia Group released the last 2.0-DEV version with actually all the planned features finished and began the beta-tests and the debugging process. After deep analysis, some parts of the code were rewritten once more (notably sections and data formats), providing a more stable and flexible source code, and many other features were widely tested both with unit tests and the real projects.

In March, I published the first revision of the Zend Framework port on our SVN. The community created a port for Kohana framework a couple of months earlier. I started also thinking about the tutorials. In the last few days, we managed to finish the user manual and the huge tutorial A photo gallery with Doctrine and Open Power Template, and we decided that we are ready to release the first stable version. And here we are!