ABW / Template-Toolkit-2.19_02 / HACKING 

                            Template Toolkit

                              Version 2.19

                             27 April 2007

        Copyright (C) 1996-2007 Andy Wardley.  All Rights Reserved

          This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
             modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

HACKER'S GUIDE
--------------

Please hack on the Template Toolkit.  It has been designed to be
extensible and has literally dozens of programmer hooks that you can
tap into to do all sorts of cool things.  The object oriented
architecture allows you to create your own subclassed modules to
implement your own services, providers, filters, plugins, and so on.

The Template::Manual::Internals document gives a brief overview of the
architecture.  Unfortunately, it's not as complete as it could be,
but the code is well documented and generally easy to follow.  Don't
be afraid to use the source, Luke.

The internals document also contains information about preparing and
applying patches, updating the documentation and various other 
useful tips.

The documentation is all built from source templates in the 'docsrc'
directory.  This includes the 'README', 'INSTALL', 'HACKING' and
'Changes' files which can be found in the 'docsrc/src/Release'
directory.  The 'docsrc' bundle is a separate distribution available
from the TT web site.  The 'docsrc/bin' directory contains scripts for
rebuilding the documentation.  See the 'docsrc/README' file for info.

If you're in the business of building a distribution (that usually
means me, but hey, you never know) then you'll need to have the latest
CVS sources which includes the 'bin/release' script.  This rebuilds
the documentation, runs the tests, fixes up the Template/Config.pm
file to a sane state and builds the distribution archive.  The
'bin/docsrc' script builds the docsrc.tar.gz distribution for the
latest release.

This document will be integrated with Template::Manual::Internals
at some point, probably as a separate hacking tutorial or something
similar.


AUTHOR
------

The Template Toolkit was written by Andy Wardley <abw@wardley.org>
with the invaluable assistance and contributions from many other
people.  See Template::Manual::Credits for details.


COPYRIGHT
---------

Copyright (C) 1996-2007 Andy Wardley.  All Rights Reserved.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as Perl itself.