Smarty

jausions · Smarty Rookie Joined: 06 Nov 2003 Posts: 10

Just a quick note: As Smarty is an official PHP.net project, I'm wondering why there is no reference of it on the PEAR.php.net site.

I know the package naming convention doesn't match Smarty's but maybe an exception could be made. A placeholder HTML_Template_Smarty would be good in PEAR.

-Philippe

boots · Posted: Tue May 04, 2004 8:41 pm Post subject:

Smarty is not part of the PEAR project, nor does not follow PEAR standards (such as extending PEAR or using PEAR type error handling).

AFAIK, these things won't change and hence, Smarty will not be part of PEAR.

jausions · Smarty Rookie Joined: 06 Nov 2003 Posts: 10

Hi,

My point was not about Smarty being part of PEAR but being referenced in it. Smarty is a template engine, and I find that disturbing that there is no reference of it the the PEAR HTML Template section...

PEAR currently offers several template engines, so people searching for one are not likely to find Smarty on PEAR... This is why I was talking about a placeholder. And since Smarty is a PHP.net project, I suppose an exception to PEAR rules could be made to create that "empty" package.

My $0.02...

Philippe
http://www.11abacus.com

boots · Posted: Fri May 07, 2004 7:37 pm Post subject:

Sure there are template engines at PEAR and surely a complete newb is more likely to find those than Smarty. That's fine with me though: IMO, Smarty is not best suited to people with no other experience and anyone with moderate skills (eg: they search google for "php template engine" is bound to find Smarty sooner than later. Lets face it, you can't go to a single PHP related site without finding some mention of Smarty and the PHP magazines seem to cover/illustrate/use Smarty frequently in their articles (I think php|a has done so in virtually every issue.)

I can't say I disagree with you on the confusion part, but I think the confusion is that PEAR is somehow the absolute PHP code repository. I disagree with that notion. I also wonder about being able to get an exception given Pear's famous adherence policies. I wouldn't vote against it if it was going to happen, but I'm not really for it either.

It's a shame, though that only you and I are expressing an opinion on this Smile

Cheers!

sagi · Smarty Regular Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 43

I believe extending PEAR is not a requirement for being a PEAR package anymore. There was lot of talk in pear-dev recently about loosening the rules for accepting new packages.

The nice thing about having smarty in PEAR is installation - that way you one could install the latest version of smarty with just a 'pear install HTML_Template_Smarty' and have it installed once for all the applications on the server.

boots · Posted: Fri May 07, 2004 9:18 pm Post subject:

sagi · Smarty Regular Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 43

But then, it might be easier for newbies, who learn how to use PHP and want to use good practices like using a template engine to just run this simple 1-line installation command.

Again, I'm not saying Smarty should move into PEAR. It should be very very simple to just upload the latest version as a PEAR, assuming the PEAR guys will agree to accept it as it is.

jausions · Smarty Rookie Joined: 06 Nov 2003 Posts: 10

Hi,

Good point about PEAR not being the only code repository, but IMHO it almost should be thank to attempted quality control.

There are a lot of so call web "masters" around that don't know anything about good web application designs and go re-invent the wheel.

The fact that coders do the same mistakes over and over again is a lack of readily available documentation... Now, I know you'll say just do a search on the Internet... but there are a lot of bad bad bad documentation out there.

What I'd like to see though is a more prominent placement of PEAR and Smarty on the php.net web site. One thing really lacking is a good basic tutorial on good programming with things like never use "global", design using MVC pattern, turn off short tags and so on... Hey, maybe I should write it Smile

-Philippe

boots · Posted: Wed May 12, 2004 2:41 am Post subject: Re: In the spirit of...

mitchenall · Posted: Tue Feb 08, 2005 6:25 pm Post subject:

One of the biggest problems I see about having Smarty in PEAR is that it's often necessarily to rebuild the cache and compile directories after an upgrade. On a server with many websites utilising Smarty, this can be a problem unless you're extremely consistent with where you need these files. i.e. upgrade smarty on the server, sites don't get their compile and cache files removed, we get a lot of broken sites.

So, as much as it's nice having this kind of installation, it's not necessarily a good thing on shared servers. With other PEAR packages we install for people, this isn't much of a problem, and we always give a disclaimer that if people want to use the centrally installed PEAR packages, they do so at their own risk as we may at some point upgrade certain packages to suite our own requirements.