Smarty

[yamokosk]

I am new to Smarty but seasoned with PHP. Like every other developer with out a template system I have always embedded my PHP/app code in HTML, so that may be why I am having a tough time grasping Smarty.

Here are my questions/comments:

Many smarty resources that I have read say that Smarty template files should be located in a non-Web readable folder. For example:

/usr/local/apache/htdocs --> root web folder
/usr/local/templates --> location of template files

But if you logically store the image files in a sub-folder of the template file directory (e.g. /usr/local/templates/images), don't you run into a mess with relative links? Are the images even readable by a Apache server? I tried this setup and no matter wether I used absolute or relative paths the images would not appear when the page was displayed. Now when I moved the templates folder (and the associated images sub-folder) beneath the web root, I had no problem displaying images.

I read a previous post on this forum where someone suggested using pre-filters to avoid messes with relative image links. Is that the only way to deal with images and templates? Furthermore, do template files and images have to be located in a web-readable directory?

Basically, is there something I am mis-understanding when it comes to a sites directory structure and Smarty implementation?

[boots]

hi yamokosk--

Thanks for posting. I think you are right that many people who start using template systems stumble a little bit on the distinction between url paths and filesystem paths.

Clients don't actually call templates -- they call php webpages (via an url) that process templates. Basically, the url of the requested php webpage determines the context of the relative urls in your HTML code.

This is nothing new, of course, but the difference is in your logical design. When designing templates, things that require urls (like your HTML images) need to specify url paths relative not to the template's physical directory hierarchy but instead to the url of the page that they are ultimately called from. This has been discussed to some extent on this forum, mainly in regards to using visual tools like Dreamweaver. Note that since templates can be loaded from resources, they do not necessarily exist in the filesystem at all.

For example, if you are using a flat structure for you web pages (all web pages are from the same directory, say //mysite/) and the images directory is located at //mysite/images then ALL templates that refer to images/* will always point to the url //mysite/images/* since the templates are called from a file originating at the url //mysite/.

I usually run around this altogether by either assigning the path to the image directory in a template variable or declaring it in a config file which the template loads and then prefixing paths with that in the template.

As always, your images need to be in a client accessable url path. It is strongly suggested that your templates are not accessable from an url path, especially since they don't need to be.

HTH

[sweatje]

a simple

[yamokosk]

Boots: thanks for the info. I have some experience with the point you were trying to make. I once wrote an XML parser.. the XML docs referenced images in html, but the parser (php file) wasn't in the same directory as the xml files.

I guess what I was trying to get at was a point you mentioned briefly, about making template files compatible with both the calling php file for the browser AND for a graphical editor like DW. To that end I implemented a simple pre-filter that was mentioned on some other post.

yamokosk