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By: Bill Sterzenbach	Search For More Articles! Disclaimer Author Terms
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2004-08-23

Table of Contents:

Working 'Smarter' with Templates - Selecting a Template Engine

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When choosing the right template engine for your projects, there are a few critical requirements that should be considered:

Enter Smarty

Smarty is a template engine developed for php. Smarty meets all of the above criteria with flying colors.

Smarty is highly extensible through its plug-ins model and large set of available functions.
Smarty is licensed under the LGPL licensing model (open source) which most developers are familiar with. The real beauty of this licensing model is that developers are able to redistribute their work as proprietary software with no licensing conflicts.
Smarty is extremely fast (especially with the release of 2.0). Visit http://smarty.php.net/benchmarks/ for some interesting benchmarks on Smarty performance. I have seen Smarty used on extremely busy web servers without a hitch. Smarty's caching capabilities ensure that templates are only compiled when changes are made thus greatly increasing performance.
Smarty is loaded with functionality. Once you get the hang of it, Smarty can greatly increase the development time of your projects.
Though the learning curve is not insurmountable, it will take any developer some time to fully exploit the power of Smarty.
Smarty is very well documented and supported through the smarty.php.net website. Their support site contains a quick start guide, many samples, installation instructions, and much more information.