[thelist] PHP Templating recommendations

[John williams]

Matt, your defense of Smarty and explanation of the tradeoffs between
maintainability, readability, and code support is very well done --
but misplaced. The original question was about what could be used for
"smarty lite" for a small application program that did not need the
power (or, indeed, the complexity).  For when Smarty would be "like a
sledgehammer for a thumbtack," I think was the original phrasing.

Smarty is a non-trivial amount of code (~4000 lines) and requires some
server infrastructure as well. If the program I'm writing *is*
trivial, then tacking on Smarty (and PEAR::HTML_QuickForm) could
easily double, triple, quadruple! the codebase and add server
configuration requirements. And really, if all I'm doing with Smarty
is {$var} or {if $var}{else}{if} then what gains do I get from Smarty?
Most of the functionality of the class I don't need or want for such a
miniscule project -- so why use it?

> Certainly, we all have our preferences, but they ought to be based
> upon a solid understanding of the choices.

Yes, indeed! And my preference is generally for Smarty. But not when
my code is going to be shorter than the package itself.