Smarty

frizzo · Smarty n00b Joined: 29 Jul 2003 Posts: 2

What is the best way to convert a fasttemplate based php portal site over to smarty templates?

I hardly know where to actually begin Shocked

Any generalized, procedural tips would be immensely appreciated!

Frizzo

CirTap · Smarty Pro Joined: 04 Jun 2003 Posts: 106

Hi,
well first you should have Smarty up and running and find out, if the template directory structure can be handled by Smarty.
I almost forget everything about FastTemplate as I kicked it from my disk soon after I downloaded it (years ago), but I remember it uses similar "tags" for the variables, so you could preg_replace() them (see below), e.g {catrow} should become {$catrow} and {catrow.item}, {$catrow.item}.

You could first make a "dry run" with every .tpl file, by changing the $left_delimiter and $right_delimiter properties of Smarty to some "unusal" characters, that do not exist in the FastTemplates, e.g 'é' and 'è' - don't use any form of parentheses, #, /, \ or other "sourcecode stuff" -- this will certainly fail.
Smarty should then at least spit out the HTML inthe templates without complaining anything.

I think to remember about some sort of "macros" and "block vars", which should be convertable to modifier functions, e.g. where you have sth. like a {menu.top}, preg_replace() this to {menu|block}, write a smarty_modifier_menu() function to handle this instead. A foreach() loop with checks to 'array' and 'object' should do, incl. recursion.
There are other things like
<-- BEGIN menu -->
<html code>
<-- END menu -->
they should transform to {foreach} or {section}

The variable assignment differs a lot, so if you don't want to rewrite all the PHP code, you should write a "wrapper" function/class that takes the FastTemplate arguments and assign() them to the Smarty instance
It'd best to subclass Smarty for that, so you can use $this.
I found some script here which I think is based on the FastTemplate interface.
Your subclass should (at least) implement things like

pparse() ... calls $this->display()
assign_var_from_handle() ... calls $this->assign_by_ref()
assign_block_vars() ... becomes
assign_vars() ... does a loop with $this->assign($key, $value)
assign_var() ... calls $this->assign()
set_rootdir() ... $this->template_dir
compile() ... candidates for $html = $this->fetch()
destroy() ... sounds like $this->clear_cache('file.tpl')

Things like Template(), t_filenames(), make_filename(), loadfile() may become dummy functions or simply set some Smarty properties where it makes sense. You can use them to determine filepath as well or to built a "file:/path/dir/filename.tpl" for use with display().

So, these are just some ideas of what I can see on the todo list Smile

A full flavoured converter is probably more than a few lines of code and you need to know both worlds, but it should be a possible task.
For the variable replacements in your old templates I'd write some PHP script(s) reading the tpl-files, and transform the {vars} into {$var}.
I'm not a regexp guru, but I guess this may become a multipass transformation for each type of placeholder, variables, and loops.

Feel free to ask, if there is something I didn't explain well enough.

Have fun,
CirTap