After some more thought, reflection, and understanding of a few more existing MODx features, let's take a step back before we decide to become a Smarty do-alike, though that might be another plug-in idea, to support smarty templates.
First, my initial suggestion of TVO's consisted of two parts, data providers and object usage. In regards to data providers, I believe this is something we can address in conjunction with the subject of data repository abstraction. This way, we can address the existing templating mechanisms, API's, and core data storage with one code base. A tight, focused object abstraction layer. If something already exists like this, perhaps we can utilize that; I'll be researching this.
Second, after learning about Placeholders today, we already have everything we need to access TVO's from the templates, except for the "navigation" of our object taxonomies. And if we can use one, easy to use "navigation" language for access to TVO's from the templates, API's and core, well, that would keep everything as tight as it already is.
In this sense, we would be turning the existing infrastructure elements, such as content, snippets, chunks, etc. into core taxonomy objects. There is internal and external data access, standardized, organized, and abstracted from any kind of repository.
That would allow for a standard format to be defined regarding import/export of specific taxonomies in whatever format we decide. I like XML/XLST for this, cause you can upgrade XML structured documents very easily with XSLT.
In regards to the syntax for the navigation, I'm in no way wanting to control this, but another thought is to allow configurable delimeters, in addition to standard PHP object syntax. Could plugins be utilized to filter such syntax on the front-end (e.g. template tags, API calls)? On the back-end (under the API hood), the standard syntax might suffice.
Just some more thoughts on this topic.
MODX Staff
