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Smarty Templates

When Alarsoft developers work at a project they always think ahead. In particular, they take into consideration future growth and further development of the project. One of the tools that can ease potential updates and changes is the Smarty template system.

What is Smarty?

Smarty is a web template system written in PHP. Sometimes it is defined as a template engine, sometimes - as a template framework. Smarty is intended to be a tool for separation of concerns, which is a common design strategy for certain kinds of applications. It means that with its help the application code can be separated from the website presentation. What is it done for? The main purpose is to separate the intervention of a programmer and a designer into the code and to make their work independent. Smarty websites are a lot easier to be adjusted to a new design or another model of presentation.

These are the advantages of using PHP smarty templates:

• - Designers can't break application code. They work at the templates that are responsible for presentation, but the code and the logic remains the same. It contributes into overall security of the website.
• - On the other hand programmers do not interfere into the templates. They create new rules for business logic without changing the presentation layer.
• - The content is assigned in one single array. The template is responsible for presentation. It makes the application development simpler and more flexible.

Special Features

These are just a few features and tools of Smarty that should be mentioned:

• - Caching. Programmers can register template functions as cacheable or non-cachable, group cached pages into logical units for easier management, etc.
• - Configuration Files. The configuration variables can easily be shared between the programming and presentation portions of the application.
• - Security. Templates do not contain PHP code
• - Filters. The programmer has complete control of template output and compiled template content with pre-filters, post-filters and output-filters.
• - Resources. Templates can be pulled from any number of sources by creating new resource handlers, then using them in the templates.
• - Plugins: A lot of capabilitis are possible due to various plug-ins. Many user-community contributions are also available.

The main feature that has made Smarty PHP template programming so popular is that with Smarty the applications become a lot easier to use and maintain as web page designers are not dealing with PHP code syntax, but instead an easy-to-use templating syntax not much different than plain HTML. All this gained Smarty a reputation of a framework that is often used by far-sighted developers for long-run highly secure web projects.