Smarty

[irishsk]

I just need someone to confirm for me the way I am approaching this.

I figure that the smarty engine is great for the areas of the site tat I want to make generating page design easy and the pages don't rquire to much customization at the logic level.

On the other hand, when dealing with pages that I may want to use under secure areas or specialized pages that I want to have direct control over customization, I can still just use my regular .php pages as always, right?

What I want to avoid is basing a large scale very dynamic site on something that could tie me down ater and if the need for out of the box control arose, I would be limited or even worse, be forced to re-vamp the entire thing.

Please reply soon if you have comments, I want to get going on this stuff and if smarty is a viable solution I will go with it as so far it is the system I am most impressed with. It has just always seemed that templating systems are limited to informational sites where there is just the need for basic posting and database interaction, but if the site is truly dynamic and requires multiple levels of coding, the template system fails. This of course, is ok, if I can just have my regluar set of non templated pages to work with.

Thanks for any help.

Sean

[alan]

Personally, I don't see any need to produce regular php pages any more, I perform all output via Smarty.

I run a large site which includes a shopping cart area, forums, and some very complex user input screens which is currently running around 230 separate pages. Smarty has proven itself admirably.

I agree that there are certain areas which at first glance made me think about regular php, but with the advances in the plugin system and using a pwerful back-end, I've had little problem converting these areas over.

And yes, occasionally, I do use a regular script, but that is normally for debugging purposes or inside the adminstration section of the site (something mere users never see).

[scaryfast]

Alan,

Template systems, such as Smarty allow php driven sites to implement the kind of architecture required by enterprise sytems / web applications.

Consider the model for the J2EE environment, this is generally considered untouchable in terms of security, scaleability and reliabiliy.

The use of template systems, such as Smarty, allow php driven sites to implement a similar system model- separating the business logic from the presentation logic.

Compare the cost of J2EE site hosting with php based hosting, and the value of php with a well supported, open source template system is clearly apparent.
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[alan]

You make it sound as if I disagreed with the idea of using Smarty. On the contrary, I'm all for it.