User defined directives as first-class citizens & WRAPPER directive

Our development team is currently working on moving from the (Perl-based)
Template Toolkit to Freemarker.  One of the directives that Template Toolkit
provides and is used in a large number of our existing template files is
named WRAPPER (
http://template-toolkit.org/docs/manual/Directives.html#section_WRAPPER).

Here's the basic idea implemented as a Freemarker macro:

<#macro wrapper include>
  <#local content>
    <#nested>
  </#local>
  <#include include>
</#macro>

So, given the .ftl files,
wrapper.ftl:

header info

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

${content}

----------------------------------------------------------------------

footer info

and, simple.ftl:

<@wrapper include="/wrapper.ftl">

  <p>Wrap this.</p>

</wrapper>

It produces:

header info

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


  <p>Wrap this.</p>



----------------------------------------------------------------------

footer info

Since our production team uses WRAPPER so frequently, I'd like to be able to
add it as a directive.  However, when reading up on creating my own
directive in Java (
http://freemarker.sourceforge.net/docs/pgui_datamodel_directive.html) it
appears that the syntax for using a user defined directive is different from
that used for the built-in directives.

So, my question is, are there plans to make (Java) user defined directives
to use the same syntax as the built-ins?  If so, how soon is this expected?
If not, is there interest in adding a WRAPPER directive to the built-ins?
Looking at the source, it appears that it simply requires a change to the
JavaCC grammar together with a class definition both of which are similar to
what is done with Include.

--
Phil Ventura, Ph.D.
Software Engineer
Research & Development Group
Velocitude
Fort Lauderdale, FL

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