Beyond The Template Engine. Any sufficently advanced templating engine approaches PHP in syntax and capabilities. Most are more trouble than they’re worth. (Disclaimer: I chose Smarty for a fairly large client project.)
Beyond The Template Engine. Any sufficently advanced templating engine approaches PHP in syntax and capabilities. Most are more trouble than they’re worth. (Disclaimer: I chose Smarty for a fairly large client project.)
We used PHP and Smarty for the redesign of Digital Web Magazine. It really improved the performance of the site as well as the ease of use (updating content and publishing). Because of this the development cycle was super fast (1 to 2 weeks), and we were able to spend more time in the planning and ia phases of the project (12 months of debating how the IA will work)… well, ok, we didn’t “plan” on spending that much time doing IA, we were just lucky things turned out to run smoothly in the end.
I’ve used the class described in the article you mention, but what is your opinion about the class. I understand that you use Smarty for client projects, but what if you will only do a small site? The two approaches has different weak points, I think. I think one of the the drawbacks of Smarty is, that you have to learn a new syntax, but you are certain that a designer or user won’t jeopardise the business logic. The class has the drawback that you can use PHP – and that is why you cannot use it when the user should be able to update the template, but on the other hand you use the same programming language. By the way, I enjoy reading your page.
Lars, I agree that is a pretty major drawback of Smarty. For WordPress we use a PHP-based templating system that uses functions instead of echoes. (You can’t use the short echo syntax in portable PHP applications because it doesn’t work if the short open tag is turned off.)