Template behaviours

[Gazley]

Hi,

Can anyone confirm whether templates are routinely loaded "up-front"? I'm playing around with the basic website provided with the standard PW installation.

I've replaced the home page with my own that doesn't reference the "basic-page" template. Even though my home page loads first, I'm seeing "basic-page" being instantiated in the background on numerous occasions.

If I alter its name to "_basic-page", the behaviour stops.

This isn't a problem or anything like that - I'm just keen to understand what PW is doing.

Thanks

--Gary

[slkwrm]

Gazley, are you talking about template or template file? Honestly I'm not sure I fully understand your question. PW should load the template you specified in page's settings that in its turn have to have a template file with the same_name_as_your_template.php in /templates folder.

[Soma]

I think I need a debugger to understand what you're doing. jk

Not sure what your setup is exactly. Template in PW or php file? ...

[ryan]

PW keeps the meta data for all the templates and fields in memory. So I would expect to see basic-page somewhere in there whether it's used or not. This is basically just caching. Templates and fields aren't assumed to be infinitely scalable in quantity like pages are, so we take advantage of the performance benefits of having those things ready-to-go in one query. However, you shouldn't see any "template files" loaded that aren't being used in the request.

[Gazley]

@slkwrm - I'm referring to the template file in the templates folder

@soma - nice debugger crack; I know I'm going to regret starting the whole debugger thing

@ryan - Caching would appear to be the logical reason so thanks for the confirmation that this indeed does happen.

Cheers!

--Gary

[ryan]

@slkwrm - I'm referring to the template file in the templates folder

...

@ryanCaching would appear to be the logical reason so thanks for the confirmation that this indeed does happen.

Just wanted to clarify that it keeps the template names and meta data in memory, not the template files themselves. If you are seeing the basic-page.php file open in your debugger, and a page using that template is not being rendered, that doesn't sound right, so let me know.