As Paul Jones mentions, there's a sort of force in the PHP community that seems to be pushing back at the Smarty templating system and calling it unnecessary.

He points out Hasin Hayder's post on the subject. Hasin (ironically author of a Smarty book) has recently come to the conclusion that there "is no need to use an external template engine like smarty".

Some nice guys over there developed smarty and it saved life of a lot of developers (i mean developers). But that time is over. Seriously why the hell I need to learn a new templating language when a "echo" does the thing much better.

Judging by the responses to both Hasin's post and Paul's post it seems like quite a bit of the PHP community agrees (including Michael Kimsal, Harry Fuecks and Brian Lozier).

The Code Lemur blog (as penned by Rob Peck) has a new post - a "deathmatch" for two of the PHP-associated templating solutions out there in a fight to the finish - Smarty and Blitz.

In this test, I am going to be comparing Smarty (the most widely used PHP templating engine and an official PHP project), Blitz (a new templating engine currently under very active development that is native compiled as a PHP extension), and standard PHP includes.

He compares them on three different levels - instantiation, simple template rendering, and complex testing. Each time, there's a victor but in the end, there's really only one "winner" - the PHP language itself that does a great job of templating things easily without the overhead of adding in external libraries.

PHPBuilder.com has a new article today that takes a look at one of the most popular PHP-based templating systems on the web today - Smarty.

The Smarty templating system is a fantastic framework for architecting php-based websites, especially in a collaborative development environment. This article will examine the benefits of Smarty, as well as delve into some basic examples of its implementation. We will also point the way to the available resources and community based around the system.

The article is broken up:

• Why smarty? (making a case - 6 reasons)
• Setting it up
• Some sample code
• and a sample template

Simplicity like that is one of the reasons this templating system is so popular. Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg - there's so much more that it has to offer. Check out smaty.php.net.

From the ThinkingPHP blog today, Felix Geisendorfer has shared some of his experience to help those CakePHP users out there that are looking at doing more templating to their applications than just the normal index changes.

One of the things I don't see getting to much coverage is how to create good templates when working with CakePHP. Since those are written in plain PHP, this does not apply to CakePHP only. So I'm sure many people have already developed their own style that they are comfortable with and I don't ask for them to change it. However, maybe some people new to the framework / language can benifit by taking a look at the one I'm using.

He covers a few different topics:

PHP tags
• Conditions
• Loops
• the linebreak issue
• avoiding multi-line statements
• Creating Zebra striped table rows

The code included on some of the points (not the multi-line or the PHP tags items) is simple and is summed up in less than six lines.

In his latest blog post, Pádraic Brady talks about a "sweeter alternative" to using Smarty for your site's templating - Template Lite.

Use the term Template Engine in a PHP forum and the word "Smarty" will inevitably crop up. I like Smarty but, similar to a few PHP libraries, it's very bloated.

I try to keep my applications lean and mean - small, fast, and adaptable. Unfortunately, Smarty disagrees with my needs. It's bloated design while packing a mighty punch, uses a chunk of memory and processor time I dislike. Since I also develop open source apps which end up on shared hosts, my concerns are even more justified.

Enter Mark Dickenson. Mark is the developer of a Smarty alternative: Template Lite.

He talks about what Template Lite is and what kinds of advantages it has over Smarty, including staying try to its name. Pádraic measures it as not only being faster but also having 50% of the memoery footprint that Smarty does. He seems to favor it for those places when he just needs something light and easy on a site.

The "Jelly & Custard" blog has a good reminder today for both those experienced with templating in PHP and those just starting out - be careful how you include.

Its quite common for people to have one main template, and 'include' their content into the main content area. This works well for small informational sites, where the main content is the bit that changes on each page.

There's nothing wrong with this as such, however, the issue is when the input isn't validated.

He gives one or two examples of how it's usually implemented, how it can be exploited, and two ways to help combat the problem - a php.ini setting and some simple input validation.