SmartyJanuary 5, 2005I have never had much faith in templating engines for PHP believing that they add an additional layer of unwanted complexity to an application. It's for similar reasons that I have a strong dislike for struts and other templating systems for JSP as well. However I have a small project in mind that calls for the use of a templating system. In this case it's unavoidable. Smarty was the first templating engine for PHP that came to mind and I decided to download it and have a ago at it. The first impression was very positive, it's only 135kb which is a good indication that smarty is not bloatware. The second impression was equally good, the installation is simply a matter of setting your php include path. Now for the acid to; to try out a sample script. Even that step was ok but the tooltip javascript didn't work as it's supposed to because of a pathname mismatch. Another pleasent suprise was the debugging console that popped up when the demo script was accessed. I do not generally engage in print vs echo debates but having easy access to this profile information could prove usefull. It was then that I decided to have a look at the code for the demo and nearly puked.
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