Using Smarty with OOP: best practices?

Howdy. I'm writing the second version of Gallery, a PHP based photo management program. In the rewrite, I'm using Smarty heavily, and thus far I'm very pleased with its functionality and performance. (good job, guys!) I'm also new to this list; I scanned the archives and didn't see this topic raised. Apologies if I'm flogging a dead horse here. G2 is completely object oriented. It's also designed so that it can be wholly embedded inside another application like PostNuke or Drupal, which means that it will have to coexist peacefully with the unpredictable namespace of another application. I want to provide plenty of features at the template level, but I want to avoid polluting the global namespace (function namespace, that is). I also want to be able to provide much of the common behaviour for my functions in a class so that when Gallery is ported to a new environment we can simply extend the base class and override the specific behaviours that are different. My problem is that Smarty doesn't allow me to register class methods as callback functions using $smarty->register_function. What I'd really like is to be able to register a namespace delegate. For example, if I could do something like this: $delegate = new GalleryDelegate(); $smarty->register_delegate('gallery', $delegate); Then inside the template I'd want to say: {gallery.generateUrl arg="value"} And have that get compiled down to the equivalent of: $delegate->generateUrl(array('arg' => "value")); In the meantime, to get around this issue, I register all my callbacks to go to a single function, then tweaked the compiler so that in the callback parameters it passes in the name of the actual function that was being called as part of the $params. This way I can have a single function that receives all my callbacks, figures out which one was actually executed and then delegates it to the correct class method. More specifically, in Smarty_Compiler::_compile_custom_tag and _compile_block_tag I added this line: $arg_list[] = "'__function' => '$tag_command'"; then in my callback function I do something like this: switch($params['__function']) { case 'galleryUrl': $adapter->generateUrl($params); } This basically lets me do my delegation, but it's a little gnarly. I'd rather do it using the delegation scheme that I outlined above. Is there a better way to do this? If not, would you accept a patch to implement my delegation scheme? Thanks, -Bharat