Clearly it's not going to be for everyone but after slogging around with Mako for the last year (<%namespace:def /> tags anyone?) this is like a breath of fresh air.
Thanks! Yah, the reason we rolled our own is because all the rest were so restrictive to authors. We didn't want a template system telling us what we should and shouldn't do in templates, so ours was a very thin layer on top of what basically translates directly to Python. It is actually one of my favorite parts of the system.
Just played around with it a bit and it's basically what I want:
1) Simple and clear syntax (e.g. they use 'end' not endfor, endblock, etc)
2) Assign template variables to anything (including functions)
3) Don't over-restrict the author (e.g. they allow list comprehensions in if tags)
4) Block and extends statements.
Error handling seems to be a little clearer than other template languages though still not great:
http://gist.github.com/184934
Clearly it's not going to be for everyone but after slogging around with Mako for the last year (<%namespace:def /> tags anyone?) this is like a breath of fresh air.