PHP templating systems - what do you use and have you tried Smarty?

[M. Johansson]

Originally posted by kunal
hey.. i was write.. you have to manually recompile your templates for them to work

Also, anyone know abt smarty's perfomance if caching is turned off? the true perfomance?

I am playing around with Smarty right now, and I can testify that it does indeed automatically compile the templates.

[kunal]

me was wrong @#$%ing docs

[dekuro]

http://pukomuko.esu.lt/phemplate/

That's what I found thru HotScripts. A little confusing with all the sets and do's but seems ok

[pneema]

My programmer at work and I use a stripped down version of FastTemplate http://www.thewebmasters.net/php/FastTemplate.phtml.

He took everything out of it but the loadTemplate & parseTemplate functions. We may need to add teh caching back in for a couple of our sites shortly.

A few months back, while learning/playing with classes, I tested Smarty, the class version of FastTemplate and a couple others. Our little two function one was faster (cause it wasn't doing everything). Granted it is missing a lot of the stuff we'd like to do that the others can ... but that's my two cents.

[AlexC]

http://templatepower.codeocad.com (i think)

and it is quite honestly the best template system i have used...imo

Alex

[=X¥®µ§=]

you prolly mean http://templatepower.codocad.com/ ?

[AlexC]

thats the one :-)

[kunal]

looks very similar to phplib

[=X¥®µ§=]

what about the system phpBB2 is using?
also derived from phpLIB

[kunal]

i havent seen it nor could i find it...

[Robo]

Just a though, if we use XML and XSL, then get PHP to parse it to XHTML on the server before displaying it, wouldn't that eliminate the need of templates?

Plus XML/XSL is sort of the standard as well. Making a XSL style sheet is a bit harder than a normal XHTML template that's all.

[kunal]

not everyone has XML support compiled in php

[Robo]

Ask your host to add it?

on a side note aletia.com supports XML and a bunch of other stuff.

[kunal]

lol.. i wish it were so easy to convince any host

[Robo]

I had a different experience with aletia.com, I dunno if it's a stroke of luck or not, but I asked them about mod_gzip for Apache, and next week, mod_gzip was a standard in all hosting packages. They also upgraded their servers to use PHP 4.1.x soon after some testing was complete.

My site does have downtime, but I like the fact that they take the time to upgrade their softwares, which allows me to use new features, don't have to worry about backward compatibility since they have PHP 4.1, and use things like mod_rewrite and XML/XSL.

[kunal]

mod_gzip would help them reduce there costs they would definately add it :P

[Robo]

Double edged sword. It also lowers my monthly traffic, so less chance of me exceeding the traffic limit and give them more money.

[mohrt2]

No you don't have to recompile manually. Smarty does this automatically when you change a template, and Smarty only recompiles templates that are changed. Also, the documentation for 2.0 (coming sometime this week) is completely restructured, much easier read. It also has a plugin architecuture and has performance tuneups up to 80% faster than Smarty 1.5.2. See the benchmark page.

http://www.phpinsider.com/benchmarks/

[datune]

Hello!

Im just looking into Smarty, and i got it to work proper.
But i don't know, either im stupid or..i simply don't get it

Would anybody care to tell me how i am supposed to do this with smarty?

while ($row = $rs->fetchArray())
{
$bg_color = ($x % 2 == 0) ? "index_color1" : "index_color2";
$bg_color2 = ($y % 2 == 0) ? "index_color3" : "index_color4";
echo ("<tr>\n");
echo ("    <!-- Firmenname -->\n");
echo ("    <td class=\"$bg_color\"><a href=\"index.php?fid=" . $row['F_ID'] . "\">" . $row['F_Name1'] . "</a></td>\n\n");

// Wenn Firmentelefonnummer nicht leer ist dann anzeigen.
echo ("    <!-- Firmentelefonnummer -->\n");
if ($row['firma_tel'] !== '') echo ("    <td class=\"$bg_color\">" . $row['firma_tel'] . "</td>\n\n");
// ... etc.. 

Ok, forget about the german commments...i think it is pretty clear where this is going...

But i would like to know how am i supposed to COMPLETELY strip out the HTML of this?
Im so confused

Thanks!

[sylow]

check the sections part of the document from smarty.
You can create array of arrays in your while statement and then send it to your smarty object.

while (){
  $myarray[]= array( bgcolor=>'#whatever', fid=> $fid);
}

$smarty->assign( array( "smartysection"=> $myarray) ); 

check out this link http://www.phpinsider.com/php/code/Smarty/QUICKSTART

[datune]

Hello!

This doesn't work, im getting the following parse error
Parse error: parse error, unexpected T_DOUBLE_ARROW in e:\apache\web\intern\smarty\index.php on line 14

I think i understand how to use smarty in general, but what i don't understand is how i can get it to loop things.

A simple example

// i have selected something from my database

//Now i want to LOOP the following
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)
{
    <TD>$row['whatever']</TD>
} 

How can i do this with Smarty?
Cause normally i would put the <td> and </td> tags in my template file...


Now, normally if i was only going to need ONE row i could do as follows
//in my template file
<td>{$Row}</td>

//in my php file
$smarty->assign("Row","$row['whatever'");

*superconfused* (please help)

[sylow]

index.tpl is below

{section name=idx loop=$myarray}
<td>{$myarray[idx]}</td>
{/section}


and php code is below

require("Smarty.class.php");
$smarty = new Smarty;
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)
{
    $myarray[] = $row['whatever'];
}
$smarty->assign("myarray", $myarray);
$smarty->display("index.tpl"); 

[datune]

Oh man, thanks a lot.
Dank U vriendelijk. (ja ik kan ook Nederlands, ben in Belgie geboren :P)

Again, thanks thanks thanks, you just made my day.

I just couldn`t figure this out.

*dances around computer showing tongue*

[Theiggsta]

Skunk:

I actually use patTemplate... the good folks @ php-tools.de made a very cool and easy to use templating system thats rather fast. So far there is a tutorial on basic and advanced use of this system and so far its incredibly fast, with rendertimes clocking under 50ms.

If anyone is going the XML route, I reccomend patXMLRenderer which utilizes the patTemplate system as well. Smarty is nice and quite fast, but i found patTemplate easiest to use and manage.

[seanf]

Thanks for that Aaron. I have just been playing about with it and it seems to be very good

Sean