Brain Reset and Lack of Twig
Hey Folks,
You ever have one of those days where you simply forget to do things you've done consistently for months? That's me this week. Not just one thing, but five in a row. I think my brain has hard-reset itself and now I've got to reconstruct the last working-state... 🧠🏖️
Thinking Too Hard
One thing that's always confused me is why isn't Twig more popular than it is as a templating language for PHP? Craft uses it by default, and it's quite good. It helps separate the data from the UI — you can build 'pure' components in Twig that allow you to map data to simple props.
But WordPress ... nope. No templating engine. You can use Timber from the fine folks at Upstatement which adds Twig, but you're opting into a lot more than Twig. It has it's own routing and methods that force you to think differently about WordPress and just what you're doing in there. While I don't agree with all of WordPress's opinions on 'how things should be', I have found that deviating too far from mainline development exponentially increases long-term maintenance efforts. And that's not a great thing to dump on your clients.
So why isn't Twig more popular with as widespread as PHP is? With most things like this, I'm sure there's reasons, I just have no idea what they are. 🤔 Something to spend more time thinking about.
Interesting Web Bits
- A collection of dead-simple sites. Some of these are meh, but some are actually quite interesting.
- This type of niche specialty is lovely. A specially-designed fork to eat instant noodles.
- A neat demo using Backdrop-filter + SVG filter.
- Julia Evans covers popular git config options.
- Rachel Kwon has collected a compendium of people talking about the spark of the internet.
- This is really neat, 'open' movies done with Blender where you can openly view and access the assets.