Smarty

[mwvdlee]

I'd like to combine Smarty templates and separate translation files. But I'd like the translation files to include Smarty syntax itself as well.

For example a fragment of a template:

[U.Tews]

The best solution is to use template inheritance.

See http://www.smarty.net/inheritance and http://www.smarty.net/docs/en/advanced.features.template.inheritance.tpl

You can place all language dependent code in a child template blocks which are referenced by the language independent parent (main) template.

Example

parent.tpl

[mwvdlee]

Thanks for the inheritance suggestion, I would have never thought of inheritance this way.

But instead I discovered prefilters in combination with the template_id, which seem to do the job and is indeed advertised by the manual as a way to handle translations. It does require the system to clear cached results whenever a language file changes, but that's hardly an issue.