What is a Smarty?

A SMARTY Crash Course...

Smarty is a template engine for PHP. More specifically, which serves to separate application logic and content from its presentation. There are two advantages to using Smarty.  First you can separate your backend database logic from the presentation logic.   This makes for a much cleaner, more maintanable website.  Secondly, using Smarty saves on Server resouces enabling your website to handle a heavier number of daily visitors to the site.  Smarty will cache and buffer dynamically built webpages and serve the buffered copy.  This reduces stress on your servers CPU and database because the database is queried only once, the Smarty page is built and saved to a file.  For example, if you have a million visitors surphing the same webpage, the first visitor would build the page, the database would be queried and Smarty saves the copy to a file.  The remaining million pageviews would be served from the static webpage from the saved file saving all of that database and computational overhead. Smarty cache time is configurable.  When the cache expires the buffered copy is regenerated. You can also have multiple cached versions of a single page by passing a unique cache id to the display() function, check out the docs on that one!

For example, let's say you are creating a web page that is displaying a magazine article. The article headline, tagline, author and body are content elements, they contain no information about how they will be presented. They are passed into Smarty by the application, then the template designer edits the templates and uses a combination of HTML tags and template tags to format the presentation of these elements (HTML tables, background colors, font sizes, style sheets, etc.) One day the programmer needs to change the way the article content is retrieved (a change in application logic.) This change does not affect the template designer, the content will still arrive in the template exactly the same. Likewise, if the template designer wants to completely redesign the templates, this requires no changes to the application logic. Therefore, the programmer can make changes to the application logic without the need to restructure templates, and the template designer can make changes to templates without breaking application logic. 

In your PHP application variables are assigned and a value is assigned to each variable for use in the Smarty template, then you display these values.

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JTMcNaught