Re: WYSIWIG CMS Part1

Kevin Waterson wrote:

Well basically, Smarty is gay. Smarty supposedly will seperate code from content. but you have still need to markup to able to handle loops, conditions etc which puts code right back into the content. But it is Smarty code and not PHP code, where is the value in that? The pre-supposition is of course that html designers are idiots when what is really needed is to teach them some basics about PHP rather than introducing an entire new (Smarty) concept. Of course when you build an application with Smarty you get to use buzzwords like multi-tiered, but this slows you down.

I'm no Smarty fan, but there are two aspects which are rarely, if ever (I'd say NEVER, but 'never say never'!) brought up in Smarty's defense. First - if you're dealing with multiple people on a project, having 'HTML' people use Smarty can prevent them from including random PHP code, which may email contents of forms to themselves, etc. The rebuttal to that (at our office) is that especially on projects that have multiple people, you should rarely have people putting stuff on a live server without peer review of some sort. Second - there's a POTENTIAL for Smarty (or any other template system) to be 'cross platform'. If you could reuse the same Smarty template across PHP, Perl, CF, Java, Python, TCL, whatever, it'd become a defacto standard. They aren't pushing this. There is one (ultimatetemplate.com I think) which has ASP and PHP parsers for the same template syntax system. Good idea, but not getting enough attention. It'd be one of the few reasons I'd recommend someone learning/using an external template system.

The extensive use of regex within the application cannot be a good thing. The use of tags such as {foobar} could easily be replaced by <?=$foobar;?> or <?php echo $foobar; ?> and most every thing else is easily handled with file_get_contents() include() or eval() I am not saying Smarty is a worthless piece of dog shit, quite, I just feel it create unneccessary overhead without delivering true seperation of code and content.

The regexes are only done once per file, until it changes, as Smarty will take the 'original' version and translate it into native PHP calls then save that file. I'm not sure how it handles concurrency on new templates (possibility of race conditions?) but I tend to think most people getting their ire up over various template systems usually don't have sites with much traffic anyway. I may be wrong here - it's more of a hunch than anything else. Michael Kimsal http://www.logicreate.com <-- doesn't use Smarty :) 734-480-9961