What Galen describes is the on going discussion between Smarty developers and others (like me). Though this doesn’t mean a template engine is a bad thing. Certainly you can build some specific model that does a lot of work for you in words of classes and methods, but not the over all extra and very confusing syntaxes to work with an IF/ELSE or FOREACH loop. To proof just very simple that Smarty and a lot of others missed the point of a template engine is the default value for variables -> {$blup|”default value”}. This is not what a template is meant for, because the default value belongs definitely business layer (data exchange between the source of information; e.g database, and the interface).

Cheers

I use notepad++ and my PHP templates looks just find in them for my needs. If I needed specific formatting I think my time would be better spent creating a custom-defined format than learning a new template engine.

You say “I’ve never had to do anything in my HTML that couldn’t be done with PHP”. But the point of template engines is not to do things in the HTML, but to not do HTML in the PHP, and (as possible can be) to not do PHP in the HTML template.

Smarty doest succeed really in the second point because its tag syntax is made very closed to the PHP syntax in order to be easily turned (they say “compiled”) into PHP. Therefore, coding Smarty template is sometime very closed to coding PHP, as you have underlined it.

Nevertheless, as soon as the purpose is an human interface, the coding language naturally needs a template engine philosophy. PHP is not a template engine that enables us to have a pure PHP script and a pure HTML template that can be both designed with appropriate editors.

What lot of template engines are missing is templates that should be editable in all WYSIWYG/Visual Editors.