Smarty

[gerard]

Is it possible to assign to individual keys in existing associative arrays? Something like:

$page = array(
'title' => 'ptitle',
'text' =>'ptext'
);

$smarty->assign('page', $page);

$smarty->assign('page[title]', 'ptitle2');

[boots]

I don't really get the reason for this, but anyhow, you could retrieve the var from Smarty, change and then reasign it to Smarty:
[php:1:2300e707d2]$tmp = $smarty->get_template_vars('page');
$tmp['title'] = 'ptitle2';
$smarty->assign('page', $tmp);[/php:1:2300e707d2]
or you can assign using assign_by_ref which means that the Smarty template var is still "linked" to the original var:
[php:1:2300e707d2]$smarty->assign_by_ref('page', $page);
$page[title] = 'ptitle2';[/php:1:2300e707d2]

[gerard]

Do the "append" functions (with merge = true) work for assoc arrays?

[boots]

darn, I always forget about append because I never use it! Looking at the code for append, it seems that it obeys associative arrays and so you should ignore my suggestions and probably just use append