For anyone that's using or wanted to use Smarty in the future and has been looking into the Zend Framework, you might have hesitated until you know how to tie them both together. Well, wait no more! This new post from the Zend Developer Zone shows you exactly how.

Inspired by this article I started to play around a bit to integrate the Smarty template engine into the Zend Framework. My ambition was to minimize the required code in the controller actions but stay close to the given Zend_View API. I also wanted to integrate the Smarty caching feature. Here is the code I came up with.

He sets up a directory under his Zend library include path for the templates to live in and starts writing code. The first step is a class that's based off the Zend_View_Abstract class to set the initial Smarty variables. He follows this up with serveral methods - __run, assign, and escape before displaying the results with output().

Finally, he gives an example of how to use the class he's created to spit out a Smarty template with all of the data nicely in place.

More information on the Zend Framework can be found at framework.zend.com, and information on Smarty at smarty.php.net