Smarty

[rr1024]

Hello everyone,

Before I get started I have to say I've writen one script in smarty and I really do like it...It's nice, functional and fairly easy once you get used to the extra layer of complexity with the templates.

Anyway I'd like to recommend if possible a switch to bypass the compile feature of smarty. I've read a lot of pros and cons regarding the smarty template system. It seems for really large scripts it's template management features out ways the the loss in speed. However, if there were a switch built in to bypass the compilation feature in which you can directly use php for the loops and IF's with a direct output it would be very useful for even small scripts.

In this case the templates, rather than having extentions of .tpl or .htm or .html it would have the extention of php and would contain all the html elements and use PHP in the templates for SWITCH/IF/WHILE/FOR/FOREACH functions rather than using the smarty layer and the templates would output directly!
Hopefully with this kind of switch in smarty we would be able to still use all the other features/plugins/cache ect...

I know I'll get blasted by the smarty pro's about mixing "php" and "html" but everything I've read has pretty much stated for the most part that this was the orginal intent of PHP to make a more dynamic and useful html.

Anyway, I'm not sure if it's possible but it seems like it should be with a little thought and hopefully someone else can see the usefullness of this.

Hopefully some of you smart smarty people will be able to come up with a clever way to create this type of feature??