working on understanding xtemplate and tools like quanta. the background
image was adequate but needed(s) to be lightened, certainly the green
squares.
remember now that i've seen the xtemplate.inc that this is based on a
generic php templating engine. understanding that should help. see
xtemplate at sourceforge. it draws it's ideas from another template engine
called quicktempalte.
the basic approach seems to have a temptlate html layout that contains
variable names that are then defined with content.
seems to go like this. each object type on the page has a name, eg. node.
this is a drupal thing, of course. a .theme file is creates functions for
each object type, eg. themename_node(). the xtemplate theme uses a
template file in html format that has variables in it where the data will
wind up. in each object function the code assigns values to the variables
for the tags in the template file. it does this by calls into a template
class that take care of the details. it can be sensitive to the installed
modules and assign values to template variables only when it makes sense
to do so. each object has subsections in the template, eg. node.title
node.taxonomy, etc, that can have it's own variable in the template. they
correspond to begin/end tags in the template. the xtemplate theme then
parses each portion of the template file as it proceedes. so the general
flow is assign values to template variables then parse the begin/end
section of tempate with assigned variable values, ie. stick the assigned
values into the variable. the rendered html object is returned to the
drupal theme engine as a result of the function invoke.
