Smarty

[hagman]

(Most) modifier plugins are just pointless.

[boots]

It won't be faster when your designer decides to replace all application bolded text (but not necessarily all instances of <b></b>) to something like <span style="font-decoration: underline;"></span>.

The whole point of abstraction is not to speed up runtime, but to help manage your development cycle. Remember, with caching, that still ends up as <b>whatever</b> in your output and in your compilation it is a straight function call to your plugin.

NOT POINTLESS.

[mohrt]

I agree that your particular example would be pointless... If all a modifier did was unconditionally wrap static tags around the variable then they surely would be pointless. However, the modifiers that come with Smarty typically adjust the variable content to some degree. Example:

{$title|upper}

This uppercases the variable. that's difficult to accomplish without a modifier or intervention from the application. So when you say most modifiers are pointless, I tend to disagree. I'd like to be shown which modifiers that come with Smarty are pointless.

Also, it is possible to make your example have a point to it by using for abstraction. Example:

{$var|bold}

This could be programmed to output one of the following depending on the browers capabilities:

<b>$var</b>

<span class="bold">$var</span>

Monte