Placeholders are one of Pagoda's [relatively] unique features. There are times when you have some text (say, a phone number, or a copyright notice) that needs to be displayed on multiple pages... but the text needs to go inside some content, and so you can't separate it out using templates. What to do? It's annoying to have to go into twenty pages to change a phone number inside some content... So we have a unique feature called Placeholders which allows you to insert some special xml (automated by our Placeholder plugin to TinyMCE) that will be replaced by the actual text at render time. Many pages can have a given Placeholder, and you only have to update it in one location (the Placeholders control panel in the admin section).
Several mechanisms have been discussed, the latest one being that the placeholder XML would look something like this:
<span pagoda:placeholder="phone-number"/>
... and pages would somehow be rendered, and then scanned to replace placeholders with the appropriate text.
It would be nice if we didn't have to render the pages and then scan them, because that's an expensive operation just for a little feature like this.
