Cheetah templates are easy to understand and maintain. This article shows you how to generate any kind of text-based content quickly. One aspect of Cheetah’s philosophy: “Python for the back end, Cheetah for the front end.” Follow this rule of thumb, and you should have no trouble reaping the benefits of this templating system.
As everyone on earth is putting their own web templating system out, it is a waste of time to get involved with this embryonic technology today.
Even the hype-daddy of web templating, Ruby “on Rails”, changes so much it often breaks backward compatibility.
If there is one thing the open source community can do it is to take a good idea, make 5000 crappy implementations of it, and end up beating the idea into the ground so it doesn’t get any sort of deep adoption. Rather, it gets only 15 minutes of FOSS fame.