Smarty

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For the candies with a similar name, please see Smarties

Smarty

Developer:	Monte Ohrt, Messju Mohr
Latest release:	2.6.18 / 7th Mar 2007
Use:	Template Engine
License:	LGPL
Website:	smarty.php.net

Smarty is a web template system written in PHP. Smarty separates PHP, as a business logic, from HTML, a presentation logic, and generates web content by the placement of special Smarty tags within a document (i.e. variable substitution).

Tags are directives for Smarty that are enclosed by delimiters. These directives can be variables, denoted by a dollar sign ($), functions, or logical or control flow statements. Smarty allows PHP programmers to define functions that can be accessed using Smarty tags.

The compartmentalization created by Smarty allows the presentation of a web page to change separately from the back-end, thus allowing applications to be developed in a more organized fashion. Using this development model, designers are hidden from the back-end coding and PHP programmers are hidden from the presentation coding.

Smarty allows template programming with several built in features, like:

regular expressions
foreach, while
if, elseif, else
variable modifiers - For example {$variable|nl2br}
user created functions
mathematical evaluation within the template

along with other features. There are other template engines that also support these features.

[edit] Code example

Since Smarty separates PHP from HTML, you have two files:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html>
<head>
   <title>{$title_text}</title>
   <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
</head>

<body> {* This is a little comment that won't be visible in the HTML source *}

<p>{$body_text}</p>

</body><!-- this is a little comment that will be seen in the HTML source -->
</html>

In the business logic code you can configure Smarty to use this template:

define('SMARTY_DIR', 'smarty-2.6.9/' );
require_once(SMARTY_DIR . 'Smarty.class.php');

$smarty = new Smarty();
$smarty->template_dir = './templates/';
$smarty->compile_dir = './templates/compile/';
$smarty->cache_dir = './templates/cache/';
$smarty->caching = false;
$smarty->error_reporting = E_ALL; // LEAVE E_ALL DURING DEVELOPMENT

$smarty->assign('title_text', 'TITLE: This is the Smarty basic example ...');
$smarty->assign('body_text', 'BODY: This is the message set using assign()');

$smarty->display('index.tpl');