A Quick & Dirty version…
Smarty is one of the most important template engines in the PHP development world. It provides a rather easy and “clean” usage and setting it up is not hard, dispite of some quick-install and Windows tutorials I saw in my early documentation seeking moments.
Before anything, I’ll assume that you are not looking for a tutorial on Smarty, this will cover only how to get it running. Well, here is a simple list of how to set Smarty up in your development environment.
- Download Smarty It’s free, lightweight and fast. Also, it’s the only(?) real template engine available for PHP.
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To be able to configure Smarty, you’ll have to add the downloaded Smarty project to your web project (I assume you have it in a folder), and load it, nothing fancy!
Take for instance, the case where I have Smarty in my server in libsmarty. If I use this line in my entry point file(usually, my index.php file):
define("PATH_BASE", dirname(__FILE__)); define("DS", DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR);
Then, I’ll be able to load Smarty with a really simple call:
require_once( PATH_BASE . DS . "lib" . DS . "smarty" . DS . "Smarty.class.php" ); $smartyObject = new Smarty();
On a side note, I received a comment some time ago about the DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR constant definition not working. I’ve looked upon the problem and it seems that the constant is part of the PHP core for Directories.
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Now that Smarty has been set up, we need to point out the directories where to look for and store generated files. This can be achieved with 3 simple instructions:
I assume that PATH_TEMPLATES is the path to your templates folder. That’s it! With a few lines of code, you have Smarty up and running! All you have to do now is just assign variables and load the template. Like this:
$smartyObject->assign("message", "Hello world!"); $smartyObject->display("hello.tpl");