Hello!

I've done (well, almost) it on my branch of NodeBB -- abstract out templates engine and add support of Jade in addition to templates.js
Actually now it's posible to add more template engines in a similar fasion.

There are glitches of course but in general everything looks good.

Motivation

In my opinion templates.js is cute but a little too lightweight. And at the same time its syntax is quite verbose and looks like "broken html". But ofcourse I can't just frop it. It do its job good and all currently working code use it.
What I wanted is posibility to use another template engines that won't broke everything.

Architecture overview:

I've replaced templates.js with general library (nodebb-templatist)
It delegates temlate compilation, loading and rendering to concrete function choosen by template type
Concrete library like nodebb-templatist-tpl or nodebb-templatist-jade registers template compiler and loader with general library.
Template compiler function asyncronously returns dictionary with relative file names and content
Loader function asynchronously returns "render" function for given template name

Existing problems

Luck of careful testing
It would be cool if that concrete template engines be simply a kind of NodeBB plugins. But currently I can't do it because templates compilation runs before plugins are loaded and initialized.
templates.js can render not only whole template but a specific template block. This ability isnt present in most of other engines. I have a couple of ideas how to implement that but I'm not sure.
Cross-engine partial includes can be implemented but requires additional hacking on top of template parsing.

That's it!

I can make pull request after some cleanups.
This post is an anounce and invitation to a discussion

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Alexander Bogdanov