Re: Template Proposal

At 08:25 PM 11/8/01 +0100, Alexander Wagner wrote:

IMHO, Smarty is perfect if you only want to separate Code from Design and don't want to touch XSLT. It has a damn lot of nice features and is quite fast. Besides, it is well documented. But if you want the templates to be edited by third-party designers, and I mean designers, not developers, you're usually better off with IT[X] or similar systems that don't place control structures in the templates. As long as you can live with the performance hit, anyway.

I'm afraid I have to agree... I love the concept of Smarty, and it's fine for designers with some programming experience, but if they only use Photoshop/Golive or Fireworks/Dreamweaver then they don't understand it... it seems to be the {section} bits which cause the most confusion - try giving them a dynamically generated table to edit :-) There again, you cannot dynamically generate a table using other template engines, so it's not really a criticism of Smarty - whichever way you generated the table they'd still have a job changing its look in Dreamweaver (let alone FrontPage)... Peter. -- Maple Design http://www.mapledesign.co.uk