I started using the smarty template engine today for one of the applications that I develop at work. The application previously used a home-made templating system that was much more primitive in comparison. It was basically a string replacement engine.

I had started reading the documentation on the Smarty website a few days ago, and I must say, I am impressed with what this so-called “template engine” can do.

I quote template engine because on the offset, that’s what Smarty appears to be. But upon further investigation it becomes apparent that Smarty is much more than this.

During the day or so that I have been using Smarty, i have come to appreciate it’s built-in function base, that takes care of things such as loops and conditionals with ease. Meaning that it really can be used as a full presentation layer instead of a string replacement/templating system.

This ability to have conditionals and language constructs purely in the presentation layer means that one can use PHP to obtain and sort the required data, into arrays if necessary and then pass on the raw data to the template which can then decide what to do with it, or how to display it. This is the limitation of more simple string replacement templating systems.

Although I am still new to the Smarty way of doing things, the more i discover about Smarty, such as it’s built-in language file support, and auto-generation of HTML select/option tags given an associative array the more I like it.

Only time will tell if it can cut the mustard though, once it’s been implemented on the whole application and tested. But from what I’ve read, it’s up to the job.