RE: [PHP] Best Template Engine

On 13 Sep 2002 at 23:44, Jeremy Wilson wrote: > I just created my own because none of the php ones out there offered as > much flexibility as I needed. There are some pretty advanced classes out > there (http://www.phpclasses.org) but not nearly what you would probably > want out of your own. Your best bet would be to create your own template > engine parser for your specific needs. You will find that in the end, > you will be much more satisfied with the result. The main problem is, a > lot of your concerns will not be addressed in someone elses template > engine. So why waste the time trying to hack their program to make > something for yours. You will see that in almost every large scale open > source application developed that uses templates. They created their own > because the end result is much more productive a scalable. Of course my first reaction is to jump. I'm really curious, what did you need to do, that fell under the concept of a template system, that could not be done in smarty.php.net? I haven't programmed very long in PHP (since this year) but in the Perl community a developer would suggest a change to the programmer(s) of the template system and if it was good, they'd implement it. This is why you see modules in Perl that have a long list of contributors. It seems as though PHP is the same. I've been working with 3 applications recently which used their own template system. NO documentation and buggy in some cases and just plain simple in others. In each case these people could have used a KNOWN, TESTED, DOCUMENTED class/module but they just created their own. Application development is hard enough in my mind to create a templating system every time you start a new project, and if you can use your previous template system then you really ought to release it to the community. Folks, I don't know about you guys but I've spent a lot of my time working on code written by others. Perhaps this comes with moving from job to job or perhaps your employer or client does want to pay for you to receate wheels all the time, but I've found it a great help to use KNOWN classes,modules as much as possible, never mind about coding standards, won't go there. BTW, I've worked with PHPNuke and GeekLog and I have still not seen a good reason for the system they use. I would not call it a templating system, nope. A lot of applications written in the Perl community are now written so that you can plug-in one templating system or another. Yup ... you have the core application but you may like on templating system better than another so you use that which you prefer ... I have seen NOTHING like this in any PHP application yet. I usually see a rather needless complicated web. Peter