Opinions on Smarty

[TheServant]

Hi guys,
I have been on a long journey recently learning OOP, Smarty, and a few other tricks and tools of the trade. I have however reached a crossroads on the point of whether or not I should use Smarty.
I don't mean to sound arrogant (I probably sound naive), but Smarty doesn't look like it does much that I couldn't do myself (with minimal effort) in the area of templates?
Whether I use {title} or <?php echo $title; ?> seems to be the only noticable advantage, seeing as I do both the html and php. I also imagine that the compiler is a bit more technical, but it has to be processed by php anyway, so extra parsing surely takes more time?
Do you use Smarty and what are your thoughts about template libraries?

[dlite922]

I use it, I Love it.

It's more secure syntax (than PHP's echo commnd, you never know). It's easier to manage update, change. It's got lots of great functions that I use and I can create my own modifiers in a blink of an eye. It does not slow your scripts down much at all, so performance is not an issue. It also has the ability to cache as well. (Like your homepage that doesn't change very often), you can cache it to a update every hour, on a busy server this is a performance gain, not loss.

If it was up to me, every PHP OOP MVC would use Smarty for the view. Judging by its popularity, I think it's getting there.

I've never looked back and I don't ever type echo anymore unless I'm troubleshooting something, for troubleshooting even, I usually use var_dump.

[TheServant]

Great post. Thanks for that. I am becoming a 99% PHP OOP MVC kinda guy, so your confidence in it not causing a performance loss, but even possible a gain, suggests that I should spend some more time integrating it with all my future apps.

[Markus]

I don't think I've ever used a templating library.. although, I can see the benefits.

Dan, can you elaborate on the security improvements?

TheServant, don't get too caught up with OOP - it's not an answer for everything.

Take care,
Mark.

[TheServant]

@Markus
Thanks Mark,
It finally clicked the other day as to how I can use it and achieve what I was trying to do with my own variations for ages... But don't worry, I think it's just that honeymoon period of finding a new tool... It's like when I buy a new hammer or drill, everything starts looking like a nail or something that needs a hole...