PHP - templating with custom tags - is this a legit use of eval?

Question

Overview

Around the end of 2009, I wrote a simple templating system for PHP/HTML to be used in-house by our designers for brochure-ware type website

Answer 1

Yes, instead of eval, you can do what zend and other major frameworks do, use output buffering:

ob_start();
include($template_file); //has some HTML and output generating PHP
$result = ob_get_contents();
ob_end_clean();