I use Timber for all my projects, but I would also like to start using a templating language like HAML or Pug. I found a PHP implementation of HAML called MtHaml, which supports twig. I thought this could be great if I could get it to work with Timber.

Unfortunately, while this supports a number of CMS, Wordpress is not on the list. There is a project that brings MtHaml to wordpress, but it's from 7 years ago and I haven't yet figured out how it compiles. It looks like I have to run ./watch from command line to get it to autocompile.

I like Timber because it just compiles on the fly. I drop my twig file in the theme directory and it just works. I would like to do the same thing but with HAML + Twig (Timber). Does anyone know how I would go about this?

Alternatively, I would consider using Twig + Pug but I see even less support for this. Basically I want to get away from the traditional templating system of opening and closing tags, and move to an HTML shorthand

I use Timber for all my projects, but I would also like to start using a templating language like HAML or Pug. I found a PHP implementation of HAML called MtHaml, which supports twig. I thought this could be great if I could get it to work with Timber.

Unfortunately, while this supports a number of CMS, Wordpress is not on the list. There is a project that brings MtHaml to wordpress, but it's from 7 years ago and I haven't yet figured out how it compiles. It looks like I have to run ./watch from command line to get it to autocompile.

I like Timber because it just compiles on the fly. I drop my twig file in the theme directory and it just works. I would like to do the same thing but with HAML + Twig (Timber). Does anyone know how I would go about this?

Alternatively, I would consider using Twig + Pug but I see even less support for this. Basically I want to get away from the traditional templating system of opening and closing tags, and move to an HTML shorthand

• templates

2 Answers 2

@3x5 "Does anyone know how I would go about this?"

I was in a similar place ~7 years ago when I discovered Twig and was like "how come this isn't in WordPress?????" I saw that there were a few half-hearted projects to port into WP — all of which seemed to be stalled out. So I figured, if I wanted it done, I might have to do it myself.

WP has so many devs/users that if you really drive yourself behind it, you're bound to find a user base. If nothing else, you'll learn a ton about open source, testing, support and how to properly construct an enduring tool.

My tip: if you're ever thinking to yourself: "somebody really should ..." — that somebody is you.

OK, I mostly figured this out. This solution assumes you have used composer to install MtHaml into the root of your Wordpress theme. Create a file called index.haml and put your HAML and twig in there, using HAML's twig syntax and all the Timber context you want. Then, put this in index.php:

require __DIR__ . "/autoload.php";
$haml = new MtHaml\Environment('twig', array( 'enable_escaper' => false, , 'enable_dynamic_attrs' => false));
$template = __DIR__ . '/index.haml';
$compiled = $haml->compileString(file_get_contents($template), $template);
Timber::render_string($compiled, Timber::get_context() );

And there you go. MtHaml compiles the .haml file to twig, passes the twig as a string to Timber, and Timber renders the string with Timber context.

This isn't bulletproof yet. I am still having some issues with string interpolation and weird output. For example, in some places, if I have HAML that looks like this:

        #content
          = fn('is_category','web') ? '<div class=blue>'

MtHaml compiles it as this:

        <div id="content">
          {% line 31 %}{{ fn('is_category','web') ? '<div class=blue>' }}

It adds the `{% line 31 %} in there. I'm bot sure why, or how to fix that.