I'm pleased to inform that after a year of work, Open Power Template 2.1 goes into a beta testing phase. As you might expect, the new branch is a revolutionary evolution. Although it was born in pain, the new development stage is a fact. In this post I'd like to describe briefly the changes and new stuff that can be found there. Meanwhile, if you look for stable releases, OPT 2.0.6 is also available to download. It fixes four bugs.

The incoming Open Power Template 2.1 will have a new, more powerful expression parser. Basically speaking, expressions are those pieces of language that evaluate something, producing a value, i.e. variables and operators. Both OPT 1.1 and 2.0 use a nice, manually-written parser that compiles them to a PHP code, validating their syntax and performing some extra transformations. While it works well, I think I reached the end of possible ways to extend it. It would be simply too complicated to implement new features to it, so I decided I must rewrite it into a formal grammar. Today, the main works on it are finished.

In this note, I would like to show some new features of the incoming Open Power Template 2.1. The new branch, which is currently under development, will bring many new tools and improvements to the template language syntax and the library API. Some of them are already implemented, but there is still a lot of work to do. It is hard to say when it is going to be released, but I'll do my best, so that you would not have to wait another year for it.

Welcome back after a short break. Although there were no summaries in the last month, Invenzzia projects are still active and maintained. We have released two new versions in June, and now we are reaching the moment of releasing... the first stable version of Open Power Template 2! Stay with us and read more about the progress and the current status of the projects.

Finally, the first Release Candidate of Open Power Template is available to download, after 4 months of testing and implementing the remaining features. The library seems to be completed and stable enough for both development and production environments. Of course, there is still a small possibility that a fatal bug will be found, but I do not think this will happen, as there are lots of unit tests present and the code has been checked with two real-world web applications.

Invenzzia Summaries are the way to inform about what's going on in Invenzzia and its open-source projects. In the second episode we will talk about incoming OPT 2.0-RC1, OPL port for Zend Framework and the incoming first bigger practical tutorial about OPT.

I've recently uploaded the first revision of Open Power Libs port for Zend Framework to our SVN repositories and it is available there for public audience. The port is not completed yet, but the basic functionality is present and seems to work. I encourage everyone to test it and submit suggestions or noticed bugs. The package includes a test ZF application, and the source code is well-commented. I'll put some extra information on wiki soon, as well as set up the "real" user manual.

One of the goals in the OPL project is not only to provide a set of great libraries, but also teach the popular PHP software, how to use them. Currently, lots of applications are designed with the help of frameworks which often provide their own solutions. It is obvious that the users do not want to deal with all the integration stuff, especially if the library is in fact a replacement for a whole part of the framework. This situation perfectly suits to Open Power Template that is rather a presentation layer framework than just a simple template engine. Currently, the programmers may already use OPT in Kohana Framework thanks to the efforts of Damian Nowak who prepared a nice port. And now, we would like the announcement of the Zend Framework port that will be released soon.

Well, after many adventures with SVN and recently discovered problems with XML prologs and DTD I finally managed to release the first beta version of Open Power Template. From now, we are going to focus on removing as many bugs and problems as possible and we need here your help. Furthermore, we also need to complete the English manual, which is quite big now, but still does not explain some issues.

Somewhere in the middle of November 2007, I wrote the first (working!) lines of the Open Power Template 2.0.0 source code. After a year of hard work, I've already uploaded a revision that finally gives you all the invented features implemented. For that time, OPTv2 grew and changed its shape. The first development releases resembled OPT 1.1.x when it comes to API and some features. They were just ported to the new XML compiler. Nowadays, OPT is a totally different library. It is much more modularized and designed to make the integration with frameworks easier. There is still a lot to do. The incoming release will be the last one with the "-dev" prefix, and in the next few weeks, the beta versions will appear, then Release Candidates and at last, the first stable release.