Official Documentation

Note, the official documentation describes Cheetah 1.0. We are in the process of updating it to include the changes in the 2.0 release. For the time-being, the changes in 2.0 are described in the module docstrings and in the CHANGES log.

Cheetah Users' Guide: HTML Multi-page HTML Postscript Text PDF

The beginnings of new documentation for Cheetah 2.0 (work in progress)

Also see the latest CHANGES, TODO, BUGS.

The LaTeX source for the Users' Guide and Developers' Guide is in the CVS module CheetahDocs at SourceForge, http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=28961.

Unofficial Documentation and Articles

Building and filling out templates with Python and Cheetah by Leonard Richardson, Software Engineer at CollabNet. Published in IBM Developer Works, August 9th, 2005. Leonard Richardson is the author of many Python applications and libraries, including NewsBruiser and Beautiful Soup. He is a co-author of the new tome Beginning Python, from Wrox.

Python-Powered Templates with Cheetah by Andrew Glover, founder and CTO of Vanward Technologies, a company specializing in building automated testing frameworks. Published in O'Reilly's ONLamp.com, January 13th, 2005

Templating with Cheetah, a DevShed article by Peyton McCullough. Published in December 2005.

Templating in Python, a Linux Gazette article by Mike Orr. Published in Issue 117 of Linux Gazette, August 2005.

Regular Expressions: CherryPy proves its worth, an Unix Review article by Miki Tebeka and Cameron Laid. They build a small addressbook application in less than 150 lines of code using the CherryPy web framework and Cheetah. Published May 2006.

How to install Cheetah on Dreamhost, a blog article published by Bruce Kroeze in January 2006.

Tierisch gut Das Cheetah Templating-System in der Praxis, a German-language article by Markus Jais. Published in the December 2004 edition of http://www.linuxenterprise.de/.

One-Page Tutorial for template maintainers. Covers a few basic concepts.

Python Success Stories: Python Enterprise-Wide at the University of St Andrews in Scotland by Hamish Lawson. Cheetah is used for the presentation layer. Hamish Lawson is a software developer in the IT Services department at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Published January 17th, 2003.

Code Generation Network - Case Study with Peter White, an interview that discusses using Cheetah for generating Java code in a financial services application. "Given my recent experience with Python and Cheetah, I can't imagine an easier way to generate code!" Published March 1st, 2004.

The Python10 conference paper about Cheetah, by Tavis Rudd, Mike Orr, and Ian Bicking. It provides a high-level introduction to Cheetah and the philosophy behind its design. Published in December 2001.

Cheetah is covered in Python in a Nutshell, by Alex Martelli. Alex writes on the Cheetah list: "Nutshell readers looking for templating engines will be tempted by my ultra-brief coverage enough to come visit the Cheetah site and get stunned. Indeed, I'm impressed enough that I plan to cover _only_ Cheetah as the one tool for any serious templating need."

It is also introduced in the New Riders book Python Web Programming, by Steve Holden. Steve writes "Although the software is still in beta at the time of writing, it is already stable and easy to use either with or without Webware. It looks as though Cheetah will be useful to many web projects, as well as any others that need flexible template substitution of a general nature." Published Jan 8th, 2002.

Cheetah was created by Tavis Rudd, a freelance programmer and designer, with contributions from many open source volunteers.
Its documentation is edited by Mike Orr, who also wrote its command line tool.
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