We have been using and developing our own forked version of WACT-а template engine for 5+ years and been pretty happy about it. However, WACT was built on two core principles which appeared to be problematic for templates with complex visualization logic. These principles are:
An essential part of WACT documentation is dedicated to contexts. XML-like syntax does not allow you to use WACT tags as values of regular tags attributes and also makes internal WACT architecture very complex that is hard to support and extend.
Thus the idea of {{macro}} appeared.
{{macro}} is built on the following principles:
Just like WACT, {{macro}} compiles initial templates into an executable PHP-script with very clean syntax (much cleaner than WACT or Smarty) and executes them very fast (we will publish benchmark results later).
Our forked version of WACT will be supported by our team for a while but it's going to be replaced by {{macro}} eventually.
For those who worked with WACT templates before there should be no problem switching to {{macro}}. If you are new to {{macro}} we recommend you to read all pages in this section marked «For {{macro}} beginners».