I just had a look at savant: it’s crap.

There are many situations where Smarty would dramatically increase the productivity of a website build and its future scalability, even in comparison to other templating engines, and indeed (I hear the critics whispering) no template engine at all, or MVC framework integrated – whatever.

If any of you can find another way to build a site which covers the following as nicely as Smarty does, I’d be impressed:

- Build a page without regard to the order the components are displayed in
- Easily be able to determine the contents of the whole page
- Separate Business logic from Presentation logic
- Dispell the use of variables used in global scope

I also looked at the nosmarty website which has obviously been created by people with little credibility and the lack of understanding of Smarty presented by the writer of the website is very limited.

I would suggest reviewing credible sources like George Schlossnagle (Advanced PHP Programming) whois held in very high esteem, is a contributor to the PHP project and also firmly advocates the Smarty engine.

If anyone could let me know of any real problems they have with Smarty Id be happy to take that on.

All I really got from above is a “i dont like” with very little substance.

@Andrei you did a good job, anyway :)

So if anyone feels nervous / insecure around those who stand for and implement best practices (which is language independent by the way) need to study the fundamentals for software engineering. Frankly, it does *NOT* make you a good developer if you don’t “get” the ideas behind best practices. It only makes you someone who was just as smart how PHP (in this case) is just as easy to adapt as a scripting language. Therefore, re-evaluate before labeling “elitist” to those who actually take the pain to reason.

Declarative programming would me more like the XML/XSLT approach to templating; I think the PHPTAL system is similar. This is also known as the “Transform View” pattern, as vs the more common (in PHP land) “Template View” pattern.

http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/transformView.html

http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/templateView.html

Nothing at all wrong with using a Transform View, although I myself have found it to be burdensome (YMMV as always).

Re “more of the same as Smarty” I assume you are referring to my comment at http://paul-m-jones.com/?p=400#comment-410029 — I am referring specifically to OPT and Dwoo there.

Have you heard about declarative programming? The presentation layer does not use complex algorithms. They are quite simple and there are only a few of them – why do you have to reinvent them every time you want to write a template in PHP? Why do you have to invent the techniques of relationship support between the data (ie. categories and products), and moreover – reimplement them every time you need them? Some would say that there are no such template engines, but yes – they are. One of them is even mentioned here and you said that “they’re “more of the same as Smarty”.” Another one is mentioned on the nosmarty.net website.

I’ve recently had to make a website with views in pure PHP and it was a real pain – ugly code, reinventing the simplest things. I don’t mean URL routing or form helpers, but if there are form helpers, why they are not able to notice that a form field is not only an INPUT, but also a description, title, surrounding DIV. And if it notices, why is it so hard to provide a custom code and you need to implement it with OOP (!!!), where a good template engine has no problems with it? Take a look at Symfony admin generator. It provides you a nice, default layout, but try to change it, you will have to deal with “templates of templates” (sic!) and each controller has its own form layout definitions. With a good template engine that supports the template inheritance etc. changing the layout would be much easier and it would be much more configurable.