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Smarty (template engine)

Web template system

Summary

Web template system

FieldValue
nameSmarty
logoSmarty-logo.png
developerMonte Ohrt, Messju Mohr, Uwe Tews
programming languagePHP
genreTemplate Engine
licenseLGPL
website
released
latest release version
latest release date

a web template system

Smarty is a web template system written in PHP. Smarty is primarily promoted as a tool for separation of concerns. Smarty is intended to simplify compartmentalization, allowing the front-end of a web page to change separately from its back-end. Ideally, this lowers costs and minimizes the efforts associated with software maintenance.

Smarty generates web content through the placement of special Smarty tags within a document. These tags are processed and substituted with other code. Tags are directives for Smarty that are enclosed by template delimiters. These directives can be variables, denoted by a dollar sign ($), functions, logical or loop statements. Smarty allows PHP programmers to define custom functions that can be accessed using Smarty tags.

Smarty example

Since Smarty separates PHP from HTML, there are two files — one contains the presentation code: an HTML template, including Smarty variables and tags - {$title_text|escape} {$body_html} - which might look like this:

HTML+SMARTY
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
   <meta charset="utf-8">
   <title>{$title_text|escape}</title>
</head>

<body> {* This is a little comment that won't be visible in the HTML source *}
{$body_html}
</body> <!-- this is a little comment that will be seen in the HTML source -->
</html>

The business logic to use the Smarty template above could be as follows:

PHP
define('SMARTY_DIR', 'smarty-2.6.22/');
require_once(SMARTY_DIR . 'Smarty.class.php');

$smarty = new Smarty();
$smarty->template_dir = './templates/';
$smarty->compile_dir = './templates/compile/';

$smarty->assign('title_text', 'TITLE: This is the Smarty basic example ...');
$smarty->assign('body_html', '<p>BODY: This is the message set using assign()</p>');

$smarty->display('index.tpl');

References

References

  1. "CVS log showing README added on 8/8/2000".
  2. Parr, Terence John. (2004). "Enforcing strict model-view separation in template engines". Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web.
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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