Block extensibility?

Hello, I'm considering Smarty as an alternative to a custom language (developed internally) to use embedded in html pages. For this purpose I need to provide at least the same functionalities as the existing ones, and a requisite for this is the possibility to write external commands in the form of short tags AND n-ary block tags. Reading the manual I found a section describing how to extend Smarty with functions that can be used in block context; reading the mailing-list I found a patch (that seems to apply to Smarty1) that should permit to write block which have n-components (such as {if} {else} {/if} ). My questions are: is this last patch embedded in / valid for Smarty2 ? In this case, can I write blocks such as the following one? {if} {elsif}* repeated an unlimited (and not know a-priori) number of times {else} {/if} Where can I find some in depth examples of block extensions? Thanks in advance, Nico Sabbi