Smarty is a
web template system
A web template system in web publishing lets web designers and developers work with ''web templates'' to automatically generate custom web pages, such as the results from a search. This reuses static web page elements while defining dynamic e ...
written in
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...
. Smarty is primarily promoted as a tool for
separation of concerns
In computer science, separation of concerns is a design principle for separating a computer program into distinct sections. Each section addresses a separate '' concern'', a set of information that affects the code of a computer program. A concern ...
.
Smarty is intended to simplify
compartmentalization, allowing the front-end of a web page to change separately from its back-end. Ideally, this lowers costs and minimizes the efforts associated with
software maintenance.
Smarty generates web content through the placement of special ''Smarty tags'' within a document. These tags are processed and
substituted with other code. Tags are directives for Smarty that are enclosed by
template delimiters. These directives can be
variables, denoted by a dollar sign ($), functions,
logical
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...
or
loop statements. Smarty allows PHP programmers to define custom functions that can be accessed using Smarty tags.
Smarty example
Since Smarty separates PHP from HTML, there are two files — one contains the presentation code: an HTML template, including Smarty variables and tags -
- which might look like this:
The
business logic In computer software, business logic or domain logic is the part of the program that encodes the real-world business rules that determine how data can be created, stored, and changed. It is contrasted with the remainder of the software that might ...
to use the Smarty template above could be as follows:
define('SMARTY_DIR', 'smarty-2.6.22/');
require_once(SMARTY_DIR . 'Smarty.class.php');
$smarty = new Smarty();
$smarty->template_dir = './templates/';
$smarty->compile_dir = './templates/compile/';
$smarty->assign('title_text', 'TITLE: This is the Smarty basic example ...');
$smarty->assign('body_html', 'BODY: This is the message set using assign()
');
$smarty->display('index.tpl');
Further reading
*
See also
*
Comparison of web template engines
*
Web template
A web template system in web publishing lets web designers and developers work with ''web templates'' to automatically generate custom web pages, such as the results from a search. This reuses static web page elements while defining dynamic el ...
References
External links
* {{Official website, http://www.smarty.net/
Free software programmed in PHP
Template engines