how to use Smarty better with PHP?

Question

I found that using Smarty with PHP, sometimes extra time will need to be used for

1) using quite different syntax than PHP itself
2) need to check small cases, b

Answer 1

I like template engines and think they should be used, but in the particular case of Smarty, I think it's waste of time, because it's not a significant improvement over PHP as templating language:

• The new syntax is still based around old concept of special tags inserted in random places in the document.
• Because Smarty does not understand HTML's syntax/structure, it cannot not help you to create valid/well-formed HTML. Smarty's tags violate HTML's syntax, so once you add them, other standard tools can't help you either.
• Smarty's output, just like in PHP, is insecure (unescaped) by default and you have to remember to add |escape everywhere where you output data in HTML.

There's one particular PHP template engine that I've fallen in love with, which fixes all those problems: PHPTAL.

It's still something new you have to learn, and it's a depenency for your application, but I think having XSS and ill-formedness problems solved makes it worth the trouble.

PHPTAL just like Smarty is compiled once to PHP and cached, so performance is comparable to raw PHP.