Smarty: the templating system that CAME FROM HELL

  • I saw Smarty in the upcoming features list. Yikes! I hope this is optional. I spent a week to get the Smarty-enabled Lore FAQ system (from Pineapple Technologies) integrated with my site. Consider this: Learning Smarty is about 80% as hard as just learning PHP, and if you already know PHP, it’s a total waste of effort; and Smarty makes it extremely difficult to integrate into a site’s design, not a factor if the blog is the whole site, but a big factor if the blog is just one section of an existing site. With the current system, templates are easy to edit and you don’t need any programming skill at all. And Smarty is slooooow. I guess for most personal blog sites it doesn’t matter, but if you site gets any kind of load, watch out. Smarty is just a loser, plain and simple. Don’t let the geeks take over this project.

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  • I tend to agree that PHP is a pretty decent templating system in and of itself. Rest assured that any move to an additional layer of complexity in the templating system will be made with great deliberation.

    having worked with SMARTY based systems before…. if WP goes that route, I hope that is is an option and not compulsory. Should it not be an option, I’ll upgrade to one version prior to it.
    SMARTY isn’t easy to learn, and can be very confusing. I’ve been using a system that runs on SMARTY for nearly a year now, and I still don’t know how it works. Needless to say I don’t tinker with the templating system very often.
    TG

    Yeah, hopefully there will always be a DUMMY option. I need that one.

    I hope we keep smarty templates simple, sticking to something like blogger-style tags. Applying too much of all those logic thingies built into the smarty system could be a big stumbling block for those starting with PHP and WordPress.

    Year Template Engines come from hell ! HTML seperated from PHP code ? wtf ? Who needs that ? I thing code like:
    if (isset($newrow) && $newrow)
    echo “\n\t</tr>\n\t<tr>\n\t\t”;
    $newrow = false;
    is cool and clearly arranged !
    READ THIS ! https://www.sitepoint.com/article/1218/ !

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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