I've been meaning to tackle some of the problems inherent in TurboStan for a while. One of the biggest issues is the dependencies on Twisted, Nevow and zope.interfaces. That's a pretty heavy dependency tree for a template engine to have.

I started digging in to the code for nevow.stan to see if I could extract the core of Stan from the jungle, but finally changed my mind and decided on a clean rewrite. Stan has lots of features I don't need and lacks features I want to add. Since the basic concept behind Stan is simple to implement it seemed more reasonable to start from scratch.

I had the basic syntax and flatteners working within a couple hours and moved from there to adding features (inheritance, includes, loadable tag definitions, etc). It took a couple days of hacking but I now have the core of a new template engine. I'm quite pleased as the entire code base is not much larger than the original TurboStan plugin (which was mostly just glue code tying Stan and TurboGears together).

I've been using the working name "sexml" (s-expression markup language) but I've also considered "stanly" (i.e. stan-like) and "sexpress" (s-expressions). I guess it's true men think of sex every 10 seconds.

Anyway, I've got to write some documentation and a Buffet adapter (and test it as a TurboStan replacement on a live site), but expect to see a release before the first of the year (i.e. this week).

Oh, and the only external dependency is the os module from the standard Python library.