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Alrighty then…
The plan they have doesn’t have a sample theme. So that does me no good. I don’t know the WordPress theme code that can / should be used so I’ll be sticking to a plain jane simple WordPress theme and consider it done.

Then I’ll be sticking my head back in the Zikula pool and seeing where they are now-a-days and trying to shift over there… ugh. WordPress is too convoluted for a simple blog engine in my opinion. Ah well.

Peace.

Hmmmm… how to explain.

If you haven’t used SMARTY before in any fashion, and WordPress is your current fave, then it would be hard to compare.

Suffice it to say… escaping to php with <?php etc can be brutal for someone who is a Web Developer versus a Web Programmer.

A template for an HTML page should NOT have code escapes, using SMARTY allows you to have JUST HTML on your page. Using the WordPress templating, you have to make sure you escaped your PHP correctly, is this an open tag or a close tag. And for newbies to Web Development, forget about it. My buddy has done several personal sites for his artwork in HTML but when he looked at the WordPress template layout he was lost. I feel that were SMARTY to be used, it wouldn’t be an issue. It’s intuitive. <p class=”{$QuoteStyle}”> is WHOLE lot easier than <p class=”<?php $_QuoteStyle ?>”>. First off, it’s cleaner. Secondly, it just intuitively “makes sense” to a non-programmer. It separates out the code from the style. Which is EXACTLY what the web is moving towards. (at least the forward thinking web apps)

It just makes more sense.

Sure, if you’ve USED WordPress for years, then what is there just makes sense. But having been with ONE CMS (Postnuke -> Zikula) since the late 90’s, and having seen WordPress-like Templating update to a separation of coding and styling with a plugin like SMARTY, it just makes life easier.

Of course, as all things on this planet, this is just an opinion. *shrugs*

I have discovered a walkthrough for integrating SMARTY, I’ll just be using that and shutting up for now. Should I stick with WordPress (doubtful after I’ve gotten my buddies site up) I might try to get an actual integrated plugin built and running. I’ve met a few people who started it and gave up due to what they called “the chaos of the code that is WordPress.”

*again shrugs*

Peace

Well, I’ve developed some seriously complex modules for Postnuke (which uses a SMARTY theme engine) and WordPress themes look like Greek to me. I’m highly comfortable with PHP, HTML, and CSS but the engine used to build a WordPress is chaos at best compared to what a SMARTY driven theme would look like.

No Theme Developer should ever have to worry about PHP syntax. SMARTY takes care of that for them.