Smarty

[emt]

Hi Monte and Uwe,

I just want to take a minute out of my day to say a heartfelt thank you to both of you for the incredible effort you are putting into Smarty.

Smarty 2 was pretty good, and Smarty 3 really, really rocks.

Smarty makes my life so much easier, and my code is incredibly clean in comparison to what it was prior to Smarty. The only "print" statements in my code is when I have been using "fetch", and there are very few of those.

The fact that I can change my output template without having to worry about forgetting a semicolon that will break my code is reason alone to use Smarty - and you have thrown in so many other useful features.

In my last utility I even used Smarty to generate the subject line for automated emails, and it works a treat. Making minor changes to it and iterating an array to get the right codes into the subject line was incredibly easy.

I have been using Smarty 3 in a production environment since mid October, and I don't regret it for a second. Sure, there's been bug fixes etc but anything that was ever deployed performed flawlessly throughout.

What an incredible testament to your work that even Alpha code was stable enough for deployment!

I know some people have had issues with the compile time for templates - to me it doesn't matter if it takes 10 seconds or more because the speed I am getting from cached templates is great and I have in some instances reduced 10 MySQL queries to 0. Before I had other caching strategies in place to get the same result, but they took me quite a while to implement. With Smarty it took minutes to get the same result, with no effort involved apart from learning how to use the "is_cached" function.

And finally, the new template inheritance is genius, making child's play to define an HTML template and be able to customise it for every aspect of a site. My main template now defines default sidebars, and adding or replacing them has become a no-brainer. Before, I had a significant amount of code to deal with "special cases" - now each special case is in a child template instead.

Thanks again, both of you!

Steve