[PHPwestoz] Template Engines

[Samuel Cochran]

Evan Barter wrote:

> 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?
>
> 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!).

I agree with Evan's comments on Smarty here, and when templating is an 
issue I tend to swing towards phpBB2's templating engine. It was 
custom-developed, is extremely fast, and now has caching abilities. THe 
new one in CVS (for phpBB 2.2) is extremely good. With a little tweaking 
to take it away from phpBB-dependant routines, it becomes a brilliant 
little engine for generic use. Give it a go.