Restaurants die meedoen aan deze actie moeten dus voor 25 euro een voor-, hoofd- en nagerecht fabriceren voor een volle tent. Zo ook het restaurant dat ik aandeed, vorige week: La Cloche in Leiden, wat bekend staat als één van de betere restaurants uit de buurt. Echter, het voer dat ik voorgeschoteld kreeg kon ik op z’n positiefst beschrijven als saai en inspiratieloos: zalmtartaar met mosterd-honing dressing (*gaap*), confit de canard (uit blik) met gewokte groente (teveel gembersiroop) en roseval aardappeltjes (één partje op mijn bord), en boerenroomijs met warme (= 2 graden warmer dan het ijs) bosbessensaus en (nou komt het) slagroom.

Slaat de Restaurantweek nu niet zijn doel voorbij? Er werd productie gedraaid, geen eten bereid. En ik neem aan dat La Cloche niet de enige is geweest met deze instelling. Mensen die door de lage prijsdrempel eindelijk eens proberen om bij een zogenaamd toprestaurant uit eten te gaan, komen hierdoor dus bedrogen uit. Nee, ik betaal liever iets meer en eet goed, zoals twee weken geleden, bij La Rive.

PHP in templates

My presentation slash workshop was about using PHP in templates, but also covered EE’s template parse order. Prior to the presentation, I dove right into EE’s template class and created a little cheat sheet as a handout people could refer to during my talk. I think it went fairly well and judging from the feedback I’ve read and heard, my audience felt the same way. Here are the slides, if you haven’t already seen them on SlideShare:

Next up

The next EECI conference will be held, like the first edition, in my home town Leiden. Robert already cooked up some excellent speakers and there will also be a so-called DevDay on October 1st (also my birthday, coincidently). What will happen on the DevDay is yet to be announced, but one thing’s for sure: I’ll be there eating cake.

Of course, the best way to explore a foreign country is with the help of the locals. So here’s what I thought would be fun… Why not ask some fellow web geeks if they mind having me and my girlfriend over? I think it would be a fantastic way to meet people and see the country.

To be precise, we will be traveling through California from June 3rd till June 17th, and we would love to stay one or two nights. Drop me an email if you live somewhere around or in between SF and LA and you’re up for it: low@loweblog.com

Template tags

The secret lies in Low Variables’ template tags: {exp:low_variables:parse}. Apart from parsing variables early (like path.php vars) or late (like user defined template vars) in the parsing order, you can parse Low Variables using the template tags, which allows you to do extra stuff apart from just a simple string replace.

For example, in the case of multiple valued variables, you can loop through the values. This means you could create a simple navigation menu that your users can manage.

Create a Select variable

First you need to create a variable with type Select. In this example, we’ll name the variable low_site_menu. You can turn early parsing off, since we’re going to use the template tags to parse it. In the Options field, we’ll add the menu items, putting each item on a new line and separating paths and labels with  : . For example:

/ : Home
about-us : About us
services : Services
news : News
contact : Contact
pages/copyright : Copyright

Next, we’ll allow multiple values to be selected and select the Drag and drop lists as interface. This means your user can turn off any menu item, as well as sort them in a preferred order.

Edit your template

In your template, add the following code:

<ul id="nav">{exp:low_variables:parse var="low_site_menu" multiple="yes"}
  <li><a href="{path="{value}"}">{label}</a></li>{/exp:low_variables:parse}
</ul>

That’s it! You could even enter full urls as values and omit the {path=""} variable, so external menu items are possible as well. This approach is very efficient; I compared it to using a {exp:weblog:categories} tag instead, and saved up to 3 queries per request, depending on caching settings.