Now, there's no shortage of template engines out there. You've probably already heard of Smarty, Template_IT, Flexy and Xipe...and that's just the beginning of the list. If you're looking for something a little different, though, consider Savant, the subject of this article. Although Savant isn't as well-known as some of the other options available, it's still a lightweight, OOP-compliant template engine that offers some unique features and is well worth a look.

He works through the templating of a sample site (using .tpl files) to create simple layouts and add in some more advanced features like assigning variables, using objects, looping and partial templates. He also shows how to use the filtering functions to manipulate the template output directly.

I just discovered nosmarty.net in my Solar referer logs. I have little love for Smarty, so it's nice to see this [comment about the current state of the engine].

Be sure to check out some of the comments to the post - they range from opposition to Paul's opinions ("Way to encourage respect for other people's work") to comments on the nosmarty.net site itself.

PHP template engines are used widely to seperate the code & the layout. PHP makes a website easier to maintain/update & creates a better development environment by enabling developers & designers to work together easier. It sure has some drawbacks which is generally the performance (most libraries offer great solutions there) & need to learn a new syntax (not always).

Some of the engines included in the list are:

• Smarty
• Savant
• TinyButStrong
• PHPTAL
• the template engines under PEAR (like HTML_Template_Flexy)

Due to time constraints, mostly because of my Solar framework project, I haven't been able to pay as much attention to Savant as I think it deserves, so I made the hard decision to put it up for adoption. Lucky for the Savant community, Brett Bieber (aka Salty Beagle) picked up on that call right away.

Savant is a powerful but lightweight object-oriented template system for PHP that does not compile templates into PHP. It uses PHP itself as the engine to keep things simple.

So Zend Framework is now at 1.0.1, what did benchmarking find? The goal is to just output Hello World with the most basic set of files possible for each case.

His tests included several different methods:

• Plain HTML
• Pure PHP
• Two different Zend Framework versions (1.0.1, 0.2.0)
• Solar
• his own "Cyberlot Framework"

For each stats are included for things like total time taken, complete requests, time per request and transfer rate.

In the first of what may become a series of "sub channels," I'm happy to announce that Paul M. Jones' excellent Savant2 and Savant3 packages are now available from the savant.pearified.com channel.

While the Savant packages have always been PEAR-installable, installing and upgrading Savant is now easier than ever.

Savant is a powerful but lightweight object-oriented template system for PHP that doesn't compile the templates, but instead uses PHP for the templating language...]]> Mon, 16 Jan 2006 07:04:17 -0600