Smarty plugins or plain PHP

Jason_Batten

Hey all,

Is it better (more common & faster) to use Smarty plugins or plain PHP to format and modify data?

Currently my news is being pulled direct from the database, the username is an int and the post date / time format is not in a user friendly format. So in case like this and others, back to original question above?

What are the advantages / disadvantages?

bpat1434

One advantage to using pure PHP is that you don't need any external libraries or source files 😉

But at the same time, by using Smarty you can allow a non-php designer to easily define what variables or loops to show where.

Now, you could always develop your own templating engine which would make it easy for any HTML developer to design an interface while now messing with PHP.

I personally use straight PHP inside of html, or develop my own templating system to utilize.

bretticus

You know, I've been hearing the framework buzz for so long that I just decided to jump in the water by using it for a project. After some research, I decided to use a framework called codeignitor. Essentially, All that a framework like this accomplishes is providing a way to keep your business logic out of your layout pages. In other words, simple code structures like looping through data to make an unordered list are acceptable, but should be avoided when they do not contribute to freedom of layout. The worst thing in the world is to have some crappy php code that needs to be hacked up to change the layout. Here's an example from my recent work. Notice, there is minimal business logic:

<div class="side">
	<div id="menu">
		<ul>
		<?php  foreach ($menu_links as $label => $url): ?>
			<li><?php echo anchor($url, $label)?></li>
		<?php endforeach; ?>
		</ul>
	</div>
</div>

I did not have to use the anchor function provided by the framework, but the idea is that the designer can change that from an unordered list to a bunch of divs if he or she wants. The code isn't too terribly difficult to understand either. In fact, smarty templates have similar code structures (just abbreviated.) The advantage is that I do not have to parse a big string and then decide what to inject within it. It really is valid PHP code. $menu_links is a variable that is handled in a function (method call) within a file called a controller. The controller methods handle which layout pages to show and passing data to the layout pages and such. See the video demos on the codeignitor website for further information.

So there's my two cents... 😃

Oh, one more thing...

Since your news probably doesn't change with every page load, you'll get a lot of mileage (in turns of requests per second) by doing some caching. Here is a great tutorial where they used APC to cache data until it times out (one day, a few hours, 30 minutes, etc.)

While you're developing, you could easily adapt this to clear the cache with maybe a ?clearcache in appended to the url to see recent updates to the database when the timeout limit hasn't been exceeded.