Why should I use templating system in PHP? [closed]

Answer 1

Yes, as you said, if you don't force yourself to use a templating engine inside PHP ( the templating engine ) it becomes easy to slip and stop separating concerns.

However, the same people who have problems separating concerns end up generating HTML and feeding it to smarty, or executing PHP code in Smarty, so Smarty's hardly solving your concern separation problem.

See also:

• PHP as a template language or some other templating script
• What is the best way to insert HTML via PHP

Answer 2

Using non-PHP templates with the excuse of separating logic is nonsense. If the developer doesn't understand what the business-view logic separation is and how it should be done, then the problem must be addressed appropriately. Otherwise you end up with HTML in business logic or business logic in templates -- no templating engine is going to save you. You have to teach the developer the basics.

And if the developer does understand that, the templating system is only a limitation. It doesn't add any value to the development process, only overhead of learning a new syntax, keeping another library up to date, and slower execution. While the latter can be solved with caching and whatnot, this only remedies a problem that otherwise wouldn't exist. So, templating systems offer no value, no advantage at all.

There is one exception, though, where I think using a non-PHP templating system is reasonable: when view-logic programmers must have limited access to the templates. For example if you're a provider for a blog-hosting system and you want to allow your users to personalize and code their templates, without allowing them to execute arbitrary code. This argument, however, does not apply to cases where a designer is willing to learn a little code to help programming the UI. If he can learn Smarty, he can surely learn PHP.

Answer 3

Mostly I think to avoid any "unsafe" backend logic to be applied in templates. Since most of the times templates are handed to designers, we only want to give them a closed set of things they can do.

Answer 4

Developers who will make use of OOPs concepts heavily,like JAVA/Spring/Oracle PL-SQL people,they say that PHP language itself is used for presentation/view/display logic in the Enterprise level projects. In these BIG projects the backend is Oracle,the database is fetched using pl-slq/java and presentation is php.The best example is facebook.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook facebook uses php for presentation, java/c++ as backend interface.

The only reason php is used as presentation because it works closely with HTML,but java/c++ is more OOPs based and can't be fit directly with HTML. Tell me one CMS(joomla/drupal/wordpress) or framework(zend/symfony/Yii) which makes use of Smarty? So WHY smarty is necessary?

Answer 5

Your analysis is reasonable. I suppose:

• Template designers and back-end programmers may not be one in the same, so it promotes separation.
• It protects you from yourself somewhat in that you can't really do "too much" PHP in your templates.
• It may be easier to optimise/precompile templates in some scenarios? (This is speculation)

Personally, I think they're more hassle than they're worth. Particularly they don't work if you want to hand the templates to "designers" since the WYSIWYG tools don't know what to do with them.

Answer 6

I like using templates for a couple of reasons:

1) It cleans up the readability of the PHP code. My PHP files become bloated and ungraceful when there are print("") statements with chunks of HTML everywhere. Also, issues crop up like how do you pass variables into the HTML text? Do you use tags everywhere? Do you use print("") and escape your HTML quotes and concatenate your variables? Do you use print("") and use single quotes in HTML, going against the standard, and insert your variables directly?

2) It cleans up the presentation of the HTML code. It can become hard to keep your generated HTML looking good if it is cut and hacked to pieces across multiple files. For example, your indenting can get way off.

3) It allows you to create multiple templates, and then a logged in user can select which template/skin he wants to display when browsing your website, and you can also quickly and effortlessly change the default template to something else if you're so inclined.

Overall, it's just a better way of organizing everything. There is a little bit of tradeoff in having to learn and type template class commands, open multiple files, etc. But in my opinion I think it is worth it because the code's readability and organization goes up.