[PHPwestoz] Template Engines

[Evan Barter]

Nicolas Connault wrote:

> Ok, I'm getting really confused now. Voices are crying out all over 
> the place about template engines (smarty is foremost in mind), and 
> they all seem to disagree. I find Smarty extremely useful for a number 
> of reasons which are difficult to express (call it my comfort zone!), 
> but articles are popping up everywhere saying that it's no good, and 
> then don't really show any viable alternative.
>
> What do you guys think? Should I just give up PHP altogether and start 
> Ruby?
>
> Ignore that last question, the first one is the topic :-)
>
> Nicolas
>
Personally, I've never been a fan of Smarty. It just feels too bloated 
straight off the bat. It's like trying to pick up another language just 
to handle something which should be, in my opinion, really simple. 
That's why I advocate the less complex template systems. Unfortunately I 
can't recommend one for you because I stopped looking around years ago 
and just decided to develop my own. If you *really* want, I could dig up 
the last one I was working on but that'd require a fair bit of cleaning 
up before it might be worthwhile (it was damn fast, however!).

Hope this helps (although it probably didn't),
Evan