Smarty

[Fenn]

When I wanted to start a web comic, the first thing I did was trawl Sourceforge, Hotscripts and a few other places looking for a web comic publishing package. Nothing I found was much good in my opinion so I figured I could use this an an opportunity to teach myself PHP.

iStrip was born! The goal was always to have a template system so that users could define how the site generated looked without having to know anything about PHP. After playing arond at first with eval () to dump variables into a HTMl page I wrote a simple str_replace function that did the template subbing. This worked well and was fast but it only supported variable substitution. There was no way to do loops or conditionals or anything like that.

As of version 1.2.0 I re-wrote it to use Smarty instead. Now it works the way I always wanted it to. So I finally got my comic up and running with it. I had some big problems at first when the code worked on my local machine (Win XP, Apache 1.3, PHP 4.2.3) but not on the server (Linux, Apache 1.3, PHP 4.3.0). After perusing the boards here I found the problem was due to my using non-absolute paths to set Smarty up and i was able to fix it with a quick hack.

Anyway, the comic is online at http://offline.foxholeproductions.com/ and the software I wrote to drive it is at http://istrip.sourceforge.net/