Fancy YAML MODX abstraction

[igorw]

XML is not fun to write by hand. You can use the MODX creator and MODX generator to do the work for you. But some people prefer to use text files. There are some projects that try to make HTML, CSS or markup in general more human friendly. Projects like Haml, Sass or SHPAML.

It would be nice to have something like that for MODX. For simplicity's sake it would use plain YAML. Why not use YAML for MODX directly? There is no good schema/validation and no stylesheets. Instead there would be an application that you can feed a YAML file and it will convert it to a MODX file.

I would however do this application using libmodx. But libmodx is really not worth the effort unless it is for MODX 2.0, imo. Using that library it should be fairly trivial to implement.

Are you interested in this? Would you use it?

[Oleg]

I was skeptical so I converted a sample modx file using this nifty tool: http://yaml.org/xml.html

Input: http://dump.bsdpower.com/2010/05/08/install.xml
Output: http://dump.bsdpower.com/2010/05/08/install.yml

Note tab/space mix in find/replace sections. It must be impossible to get right by hand.

[igorw]

The attributes (such as lang) can be simplified, and the whole action-group tag will of course not be in the YAML file. To clarify: this is intended for the <header> section of the MODX, or the info.xml of the MODX 2.0.