Adam Jimenez | Smarty Templating System

Smarty Templating System

After working on several projects with web designers it soon became apparent that after I'd added my programming it became very difficult for the designer to maintain. What I needed was a way to separate the programming from the design. It was around then that I came across Smarty - PHP templating system. At the time Smarty was an official sub-project of PHP which gave it a big boost over it's competitors in my eyes.

I used smarty in a few projects and quite liked it. It was like learning a new language as there is quite a lot of new functions to learn. Some of these functions are great but some are just equivalents of PHP functions because PHP can't be used directly in a template. I also had some issues to overcome - like making sure certain pages didn't get cached and that all variables had been correctly declared - or else they would not appear on the page.

I found that altho the pages were easier to edit than what I had done before they still had a few issues for designers. A lot of designers use dreamweaver and were put off when the CSS and images weren't displaying in design mode because the template was in a different path. Also whereas before PHP blocks would be hidden behind a PHP icon, now the Smarty code was fully displayed and looked like page content and could be mistakenly edited. The idea behind Smarty code is that it's supposed to be easier to understand for designers. In practice I've found that designers probably don't fully understand code however it's presented / and nor should they need to.

Smarty added a bit of bloat to my projects and also became another thing to maintain - having to upgrade all projects with the latest version of smarty and hoping nothing breaks. And a few times I'd been caught out when projects had moved servers and I hadn't checked the permissions on the template cache folder - which isn't always obvious to spot.

So because of these issues, I stopped using Smarty and developed my own templating system which is a lot simpler and is all done in PHP and doesn't require you to learn a new language. It's friendlier for designers and has some built-in SEO goodness like search engine friendly URLs, automated page titles and dynamic sitemaps. I've since re-written all active projects that used Smarty to take advantage of this new format.

On reflection Smarty was not the best solution for me. However it did teach me the fundamental importance of keeping code separate from design. I also learned from it some fantastic functions for dealing with html drop-downs and date/time selections which I've subsequently adapted and use in my own projects. So while I wouldn't recommend it, I've definitely benefited from the experience.

08/05/2009 permalink | Posted in web development | 0 Comments »