I recently discovered the PHP framework Kohana (which is awesome) and was reading a thread about using it in conjunction with a templating engine such as Smarty or Twig. My ques
I have two really good reasons I can think of for doing this...
Creating markup that is repeated throughout the site in a consistent format is easier, plus you can update it later without a lot of grepping.
If this is for a real company, the people determining content aren't likely to be really familiar with HTML, much less PHP. Having a simple template language that keeps styles looking the right way and generates valid markup without much code knowledge is really handy.