What is Smarty?
Why use it?
Use Cases and Work Flow
Syntax Comparison
Template Inheritance
Best Practices
Crash Course
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Smarty is a template engine for PHP, facilitating the separation of presentation (HTML/CSS) from application logic. This implies that PHP code is application logic, and is separated from the presentation.
The Smarty design was largely driven by these goals:
When it comes to templating in PHP, there are basically two camps of thought. The first camp exclaims that "PHP is a template engine". This approach simply mixes PHP code with HTML. Although this approach is fast from a pure script-execution point-of-view, many would argue that the PHP syntax is messy and difficult to maintain when mixed with presentation. PHP works well for programming, but not so well for templating.
The second camp exclaims that presentation should be void of all programming code, and instead use simple tags to indicate where application content is revealed. This approach is common with other template engines (and other programming languages), and is the approach that Smarty takes. The idea is to keep the templates focused squarely on presentation, void of application code, and with as little overhead as possible.
There are many benefits of separating PHP code from templates, some of which are:
<?php echo strtolower(htmlspecialchars($title,ENT_QUOTES,UTF-8)); ?>
{$title|escape|lower}No different than PHP being an abstraction layer on top of C to simplify development, Smarty is an abstraction layer on PHP to simplify template maintenance.
For a syntax comparison of PHP vs Smarty, see Syntax Comparison.
A common question: "Web designers have to learn a syntax anyways, why not PHP?" Of course web designers can learn PHP, and they may already be familiar with it. The issue isn't their ability to learn PHP, it is about the maintenance of PHP mixed with HTML. {tags} are simpler, more intuitive, and less fragile than PHP statements. Templates also restrict what can be put in a template. PHP makes it too easy to add code into templates that doesn't belong there. You could teach designers the rules of application design, but this should be unnecessary (now they are developers!). The PHP manual is intended for developers. Designers would only need a small fraction of this manual, and it doesn't make it easier for them to find what they need. Smarty gives web designers exactly the tools they need, and gives developers fine-grained control over these tools. Numerous features are also available for presentation such as template inheritance, which maximizes template re-use and streamlines organization.
Although Smarty gives you the tools to make a clean separation of presentation from application code, it also gives you plenty of room to bend those rules. A poor implementation (i.e. injecting PHP in templates) will cause more problems than the presentation separation was meant to resolve. The documentation does a good job of indicating what things to watch out for. Also see the Best Practices section.
The Crash Course section gives a good overview how Smarty is typically implemented in a PHP application.
Under the hood, Smarty compiles copies of the templates as PHP scripts. This way you get the benefits of both template tag syntax and the speed of PHP. Compilation happens once when each template is first invoked, and then the compiled versions are used from that point forward. Smarty takes care of this for you, so the template designer just edits the Smarty templates and never has to manage the compiled versions. This approach keeps the templates easy to maintain, and yet keeps execution times extremely fast. Since the compiled versions are PHP, op-code accelerators such as APC or ZendCache continue to work on the compiled scripts.
Template inheritance is new to Smarty 3, and it's one of many great new features. Before template inheritance, we managed our templates in pieces such as header and footer templates. This organization lends itself to many problems that require some hoop-jumping, such as managing content within the header/footer on a per-page basis. With template inheritance, instead of including other templates we maintain our templates as single pages. We can then manipulate blocks of content within by inheriting them. This makes templates intuitive, efficient and easy to manage. See Template Inheritance for more info.
There are a couple of good reasons. First, Smarty can be used for more than just XML/HTML based templates, such as generating emails, javascript, CSV, and PDF documents. Second, XML/XSLT syntax is even more verbose and fragile than PHP code! It is perfect for computers, but horrible for humans. Smarty is about being easy to read, understand and maintain.
Although Smarty insulates you from PHP, you still have the option to use it in certain ways if you wish. Template security forces the restriction of PHP (and select Smarty functions.) This is useful if you have third parties editing templates, and you don't want to unleash the full power of PHP or Smarty to them.
Smarty is not the only engine following the "Separate Programming Code from Presentation" philosophy. For instance, Python has template engines built around the same principles such as Django Templates and CheetahTemplate. Note: Languages such as Python do not mix with HTML natively, which give them the advantage of proper programming code separation from the outset. There are libraries available to mix Python with HTML, but they are typically avoided.
Smarty is not an application development framework. Smarty is not an MVC. Smarty is not an alternative to Zend Framework, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, or any of the other application development frameworks for PHP.
Smarty is a template engine, and works as the (V)iew component of your application. Smarty can easily be coupled to any of the engines listed above as the view component. No different than any other software, Smarty has a learning curve. Smarty does not guarantee good application design or proper separation of presentation, this still needs to be addressed by a competent developer and web designer.
Smarty is not meant to be a tool for every job. The important thing is to identify if Smarty fits your needs. There are some important questions to ask yourself:
TEMPLATE SYNTAX. Are you content with PHP tags mixed with HTML? Are your web designers comfortable with PHP? Would your web designers prefer a tag-based syntax designed for presentation? Some experience working with both Smarty and PHP helps answer these questions.
THE BUSINESS CASE: Is there a requirement to insulate the templates from PHP? Do you have untrusted parties editing templates that you do not wish to unleash the power of PHP to? Do you need to programmatically control what is and is not available within the templates? Smarty supplies these capabilities by design.
FEATURE SET: Does Smarty's features such as caching, template inheritance and plugin architecture save development cycles writing code that would be needed otherwise? Does the codebase or framework you plan on using have the features you need for the presentation component?
See also the section about use cases and work flow on the Smarty website.
There are tens of thousands of unique visitors on the Smarty website daily, mostly developers reading documentation. Many well-known PHP projects make use of Smarty such as XOOPS CMS, CMS Made Simple and Tiki CMS/Groupware to name a few.
Whether you are using Smarty for a small website or massive enterprise solution, it can accommodate your needs. There are numerous features that make Smarty a great choice: