my fave toy of the day is rfasttemplate which is an extension of fasttemplate. i tried fasttemplate out a while ago but got annoyed with the need to have separate template files whenever you wanted to repeat elements. in rfasttemplate the r stands for recursive and you can write whole templates in a single file and have repeating elements within repeating elements with repeating elements… it’s working great.

i’ve been using this in my reworking of the backend of darren’s site notaflag to split things into html template files that the designer (ie darren) can mess with and php files that the coder can mess with with neither of us treading on the others toes.

this caching version looks worth looking into as well.

another useful extension would be to write a code generator that would generate some skeleton php code given the template file. i’ll see if i can find some spare time…