WP-HAML allows you to use HAML (powered by PHP-HAML) in your templates, instead of embedded PHP — which always turns into a horrible mess as soon as your application is more complicated than “Hello World”.
It’s powered by PHP-HAML, which is a port of HAML, as developed for use with Ruby on Rails. The official distribution is a few years old, and has some bugs, so we’ve forked it and put the source on github:
http://github.com/joebushi/phphaml
WP-HAML should work seamlessly with themes that don’t support it. When your theme’s templates are being loaded, WP-HAML will look for a file named .haml.php (eg: search.haml.php, comments.haml.php) and, if one is found, will load and execute the template, bypassing Wordpress’s normal template loader.
If no .haml.php file is found, WP-HAML will return control to the Wordpress template loader, which will load the original template file.
The upshot: You can leave WP-HAML enabled for themes which don’t support it, and you can use it to implement bits of HAML in a theme that is otherwise normal. It should be pretty easy to port your theme to HAML in your spare time!
- Request comes in, and is passed to template loader
- Plugin intercepts reqest and checks to see if there’s a matching haml template
- If there is, the compiled-templates folder is checked to see if it has already been compiled. If it has, it is executed immediately
- If it hasn’t, the HAML is parsed, converted to embedded PHP which is savedto the compiled-templates folder and executed
The compiled templates aren’t static files: they’re PHP scripts, so WP-HAML shouldn’t intefere with any cacheing plugins that you may be using.
h2.INSTALLATION AND SETUP
- Create a directory named ‘templates’ in the root of your theme directory. This is where you HAML templates will be stored.
- Create a directory named ‘partials’ in the HAML template directory.
php-haml has no error checking or reporting at all. It will take whatever you give it, and compile it to an embedded PHP file, even if it’s totally broken. Sometimes, if you give it something really left-field, you’ll get an error within the parser itself.
This is obviously very bad. Suggestions for replacement parsers (or patches!) would be most welcome.
In practice, it’s not that hard to work around. Create your theme with WP_DEBUG set to true (in wp-config.php) and check the compiled template when you get a PHP error. It’s usually fairly obvious what went wrong and how to fix it.
First, check the website: http://github.com/dxw/wp-haml
If you can’t find what you need, get in touch. I can’t guarantee to support any of this, but pop me an email on harry@thedextrousweb.com, or visit us in
dextrousweb on Freenode. We’ll see what we can do.