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

Pros

• No PHP in your HTML files (Allows both PHP and HTML identing)
• Pipes {$var|default:"None selected"} {$var|urlencode}
• Foreachelse: {foreach item=row from=$results}{$row.name}
  {foreachelse}No results{/foreach}
• Themable websites/pages (Using only CSS has it limits)

Cons

• Other language syntax
• Not always obvious code {"Y-m-d"|strftime:$timestamp} {$array|@var_dump}
• Slight overhead

I can highly recommend the "template" approach(mVc), but both Smarty and plain PHP are up for the task.