Continuing the project I started with quite some time ago and just completing recently (for the regular definition of "completed" - i.e., release early release often), I've decided to make my front page a bit more dynamic. So I started by doing some simple stuff. For example, our group's meeting dates are already in a CSV table, so I just created a function in my plugin that extracted it from a table with "YEAR,MONTH,DAY,..." as the first column headers, converted it to something readable ("Monday, May 8, 2006"), et voila, I got what I wanted. Plop it into a cron entry, which both runs ttree and a small ftp upload script I also have, and it's about as dynamic as it needs to be.

The next step was to put descriptions of upcoming events. However, I'm figuring that I don't need to continue advertising upcoming events after they passed. So a bit more magic, and I came up with this: 

[%- USE date %]
[%- SET today = date.format(date.now, "%Y%m%d") %]

[download]
and then ... 
[% IF today < 20060406 %]
<p>Guess what.  On April 6, 2006, we're going to do something special!
On April 7th, this paragraph disappears!  Neat!</p>
[% END %]

[download]
The only minor annoyance is that my editor of choice seems to think that the < sign there is the open character for an HTML tag. But that's really quite minor.

What I'm wondering is if anyone can see, or better yet, already uses, a more elegant solution. Perhaps a filter? Is there such a beast built in that I'm missing? Or perhaps that I haven't figured out the right keywords for searching on CPAN? I imagine this would be easy for TT2 experts, but I'm just not seeing it today for some reason.

By "elegant" I mean a few things. First, the template must be readable. Putting in unix timestamps (seconds since epoch) isn't readable ;-). Second, it should be able to handle both begin and end dates. So I may not want to start displaying some text until a certain date, and/or I may want to stop displaying some text after a certain date. The simple numeric comparison above meets that through simple numeric comparisons. However, a bit more obvious to me would be something like: 

  [% FILTER ByDate
       start = '2006-04-15'
       until = '2006-06-28' %]
  This is only visible from April 15 through June 28, 2006.
  [% END %]

[download]
Obviously, since this is a static document, I'll have to ensure the cron job gets run daily at an appropriate time. But that's somewhat outside the scope of my question.

Is this reasonable/normal usage of TT2? Is there something I'm overlooking?

In reply to Date-sensitive output with Template Toolkit by Tanktalus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
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