Smarty provides the programmer and template designer with a wealth of tools to automate tasks commonly dealt with at the presentation layer of an application. Although it can be used for such a simple purpose, its focus is on quick and painless development and deployment of your application, while maintaining high-performance, scalability, security and future growth.
Features of Smarty
- Caching: Smarty provides fine-grained caching features for caching all or parts of a rendered web page, or leaving parts uncached. Programmers can register template functions as cacheable or non-cachable, group cached pages into logical units for easier management, etc.
- Configuration Files: Smarty can assign variables pulled from configuration files. Template designers can maintain values common to several templates in one location without intervention from the programmer, and config variables can easily be shared between the programming and presentation portions of the application.
- Security: Templates do not contain PHP code. Therefore, a template designer is not unleashed with the full power of PHP, but only the subset of functionality made available to them from the programmer (application code.)
- Easy to Use and Maintain: Web page designers are not dealing with PHP code syntax, but instead an easy-to-use templating syntax not much different than plain HTML. The templates are a very close representation of the final output, dramatically shortening the design cycle.
- Variable Modifiers: The content of assigned variables can easily be adjusted at display-time with modifiers, such as displaying in all upper-case, html-escaped, formatting dates, truncating text blocks, adding spaces between characters, etc. Again, this is accomplished with no intervention from the programmer.
- Template Functions: Many functions are available to the template designer to handle tasks such as generating HTML code segments (dropdowns, tables, pop-ups, etc.), displaying content from other templates in-line, looping over arrays of content, formatting text for e-mail output, cycling though colors, etc.
