External URL inclution

[aseba]

This is a small patch that you may be interested in

I've added a small patch to allow us to include external pages into the template. You just add the url as a parameter to the include call and it will add an echo file_get_contents() to the template. It's not very scalable, Maybe a good idea would be to cache the included page, but as it is works perfect for us.

It's something to handle with care but really powerful, and made our lives easier at building templates, Maybe you guys use this patch

Cheers!

[feulf]

Cool. I'll test it today! Could you do the same for RainTpl 3?

[feulf]

The inclusion of external HTML is nice, but what about security? I mean, RainTpl has a sandbox to load templates by untrusted source, so if for instance you have a CMS, you can let the users load their own template. What it could cause the loading of external sources?

I think a template that load an external source is not dangerous at all, but it considering it will load the external source each time is been called, that it could make the template slow to load, which it should be a smaller issue.

What's your opinion on it? I think I'll implement your change anyway because is very useful!

[aseba]

That's what I was saying that it's something to handle with care.. hehe

In our context, security is not an issue because the pages we include are controlled by us. If you see, for example, http://editor.olapic.com/photos/cbschicago the header is being included with this patch. As we work with other clients trying to do a white label with their brand over our product, the inclution of external files made easier for us to do that. They just give us an URL with an stand alone header and footer, we include it, and we are done. If they change it, we dont need to do anything.

I'm sure not everyone would need this but ours is a good example of when to use it. hehehe

On the other hand, Loading and external source everytime IS slower. And thats something we are working on. I would like to cache the external resource in some way (maybe on a file) and include that if we have it. I haven't done that yet because I didn't have the time But it may be a good idea indeed.

Cheers!

[feulf]

Well, you can already cache an included file in RainTpl 2, e.g.:
{include="http://yourlink.com" cache="3600"}
http://www.raintpl.com/Documentation/Documentation-for-web-designers/RainTPL-Tags/_include_%20template%20_/

I think the main problem is the security, but it can be solved with a setting that can enable/disable the remote include, which by default it should be disabled:
RainTpl::configure( "allow_remote_include", true );

we also need a default cache time for remote include, 0 by default:
RainTpl::configure( "remote_include_cache_time", 0 );

Do you think you can do that? In case I will at first opportunity to work on it.