Smarty - Yes or No?

I think Smarty has two sides, the good one and the bad side.

Good side:
- Let's you create template able sites with a few lines of PHP
- It's free!
- Open source!

Bad side:
- Learn the framework coding
- Someone with none PHP knowledge or beginner designer can be hard to design

Depends how you see it....

The downs are hardly downs, the smarty language takes about a day to learn, the second down could be said about advanced PHP concepts.

A templating system is needed for a larger script, that way you can change the template without screwing up the code, vB uses one (not smarty) so we can have multiple skins.

Mentioning vB to backup your argument does you no favours at all. It'd definitely be in my top 10 of the most badly coded pieces of software ever. Period. Templating systems are needed but Smarty's way of doing things is a joke. There's just no way I could go back to such a scruffy way of coding.

Granted, vB isn't a well coded program. If you have a better templating system then smarty, I'm all ears.

I just stick to an MVC pattern - which is technially what Smarty does also. I have absolutely no problem with that aspect of Smarty. I just impassionately dislike Smarty's introduction of a new programming language. It's both impractical and sluggish.

do old browsers even support these "home grown languages"?

What? PHP is a server side language, all the browser has to support is HTML.

Edit: *looks at post count* nvm, it all makes sense.

I say no!!!
I hate assign!

I use template engine create by myself. Some of the logic is likely SMARTY, but I cut assign off, and some other tools.

Smarty has it's place - in a work environment of a team of 12.

But if you are the ONLY one working with it then it is a waste of time a resources to load that whole lib. I built my own templating system that is WAY faster than smarty while still allowing PHP code inside of templates. The reason it works for me is because only 1-3 people will be working with it and they aren't going to be doing stupid stuff with PHP code.

An example is wordpress. It is a blog for 1+ people so they don't mess with something so big as smarty. If the author wants' to hack his own site from the template files - they won't stop him.

So what is your need? Group? or Personal?

Smarty >= 10 > ob_start() and PHP

Creating your own plugin based template system is very simple and then you can be sure that you won't have all of the bugs that smarty has always been associated with.