Smarty

[datenpunk]

Hello,

I'm just trying some template engines and ran into troubles with all of them.
Following problem:

A CMS. The editor adds content. This content may conain a user function like showArticle(artID)
Now this article has to be shown.
This article may also contain other user level functions like ShowImage(ImageID).

Problems with other engines:
phplib template engine support no user functions but supports showing undefined tags.
If I do a recursion through this undefined tags looking for certain strings "{showImage|234}" I am able to do what I want.
Con: Other template engines have a nicer api.

PEAR's IT[X], and Sigma support user functions but the content returned from this functions isn't parsed by the template engine as it seems.

So - my question:
Is it possible to do such things with smarty without problems?

Thanks in advance

Daniel Khan

[messju]

yes, you can do such things. i don't know if "without problems": you give a lot of power to your editor if you let him add articles with full template-syntax.

see http://smarty.php.net/manual/en/plugins.resources.php if you want to treat content from a database as a smarty template, for example.

if you don't need that complex syntax, but just want to insert articles and images inside your {$content}, you can consider writing a modifier that searches for special markup and replaces it accordingly. that means less possibilities for the editor, but also less possibilities for errors.

see: http://smarty.php.net/manual/en/plugins.modifiers.php for that.

HTH
messju

[boots]

To add to messju's comments, you can also separate the tasks of template layout and content insertion using different instances of Smarty to control each. That way you can use different security settings (which affects what is available to the template user) for each task. I actually do something similar to this since I like exploiting Smarty's capabilities for as many users as possible.

[datenpunk]

Thank's that helped a lot

Daniel Khan