Parsey Driftchart

Old Parsey wore a patch on one eye—
The one that saw plugins multiply.
The stack looped on itself,
The templates off the shelf,
And the recursion was do-or-die.

She manifested during a timeout
In TikiWiki 15.3, with a shout.
She patched tracker forms
Through template-file storms,
And the admin panel bled its last clout.

Her cloak is a quilt of despair:
Broken translations stitched with care,
Half-rendered modules,
And comments in noodles
Of /templates_c/ found everywhere.

She diagnoses WYSIWYG rot
By smell—a peculiar lot.
The corruption was fungal,
The markup was bungled,
And the theme was forever a knot.

Blamey blamed her for a disappearing menu—
A grudge unresolved on the venue.
The category tree
Collapsed—you see—
Under its own weight. (Not her sinew.)

“The structure’s a lie,” she’d insist,
“The theme is a mask in the mist.
But the module remembers
Through all of its embers,
And the config will never be dismissed.”

She drifts between configuration screens
And obsolete menus—the scenes
Of a deprecated life.
Each template a knife,
And the CSS void intervenes.

She patches mid-render with pencils
And sighs—her only utensils.
The .tpl syntax old,
The divination bold,
And the tracker forms cling to their stencils.

She detects permissions rot by VLAN—
A ceremonial task in her plan.
Each plugin she loops
Into stabilized groups
Or combustion. (Whatever she can.)

Old Parsey, with one eye gone blind,
Left the plugin stack recursion behind.
She poked at a .tpl,
Like a soul down in hell,
And left the whole layout maligned.

The WYSIWYG’s starting to reek,
Like a module that’s leaked for a week.
She diagnoses the rot,
In a technical knot,
While the admin panel’s starting to squeak.

So if themes are never quite final
And the module remembers each signal,
That’s Parsey’s refrain:
Where the templates remain,
And the driftchart is perfectly spinal.