Let's talk templating engines...

[rivka]

I'm starting a large project, and am trying to decide on a templating engine. I had planned on using Smarty -- it offers a lot of the features that I need, such as easy multi-language support, and the ability to put basic logic within the template.

One of my coworkers, though, really hates Smarty -- he says it has a huge overhead, and that having logic within the template is ridiculous (it certainly makes the things I want to do a hell of a lot easier).

(let me clarify the whole adding logic to the template, and why I want to do it -- there are certain things that I want to be able to turn on/off within the template based on user login, and it's a lot easier to do that with a simple {if} statement than what I've seen in other templating systems)

If you have a very busy site, is the overhead on Smarty truly going to be an issue? If so, are there are other templating engines out there that offer the features I'm looking for (easy multilanguage support, and the ability to use basic logic such as if/else and loops) that do not have the huge overhead that Smarty has?

Thanks for any help.

[ednark]

Search this forum for this discussion which has been done to death.

My punchline: Just use php as if it were a template. Have some files which you tag as templates (blah.tmpl.php). Try to put as little logic in as possible, specifically a template should never gather or generate data, it should ONLY display data that has been gathered or generated for it. Separation of intent is a good idea. It sucks to try and read someones code which writes out html.

We use Smarty at my company for legacy reasons.

[Kudose]

Smarty sucks at iteration, but works well overall IMHO.

PHPTal may be worth checking into.