Presentation Layer - The Smart(y) Way
Monday, June 25th, 2007Using PHP? Using Smarty? If not then why not?
Templating for presentation is often a pain - on the windows platform i’ve used vanilla ASP, and ASP with XML which is then transformed into XHTML using XSLT. With ASP.NET again the same schemes, plus the use of themes. On other platforms JSP is a similar story. On all platforms CSS is heavily used but there’s still something missing and i18n (internationalisation) was still more difficult than it should be… and working with design agencies was a nightmare (as they had to hack XSLT or look at ASP/ASP.NET/JSP pages).
The solution is proper templating and i tried a few and hated them all… Smarty is the exception - if you’re using PHP and you’re not using Smarty then you’re missing a trick.
The intro guide is great, the plug-in support is nice and the template files are easy for even the most hardcore dreamweaver based graphic designer to understand.
Check it out at http://smarty.php.net for more info