PHP vs template engine [closed]

Answer 1

For template engines:

1. Added security for end-user customization. Themes in pure PHP have unconstrained ability to cause harm to a user and their installation. Thus a template engine removes that risk, if it is a good one.
2. Ease of use for non-programmers, such as graphic artists or web designers.

For plain-php:

1. The speed of pure PHP cannot be matched by any template engine built atop it.
2. The full power of PHP is available to the output, and not just an interpreted or filtered portion.

I prefer PHP itself if at all possible. And most folks don't want to hack your software by making a custom theme, so it's easy to take a cursory read and investigate its security. That said, I am the "between guy" who does both templating and programming, and even some graphic arts; my skillset differs from a strict programmer and a strict artist/designer.

Answer 2

I use a template engine in PHP because I prefer to have a high degree of separation between business logic and presentation logic. Web programming is much easier when your PHP (or any other programming language) doesn't have HTML scattered throughout. This is Microsoft's code behind is so popular.

I use a template engine called KudzuPHP. It is a port of my KudzuASP for Classic ASP. It differs from many template engines in that the code that hosts the business rules and logic becomes an event handler for the template engine after the template engine is invoked. This approach allows you to modify the templates (moving large blocks of presentation) without requiring you to modify the code of the PHP code.

KudzuPHP contains it's own library system and writing new extension tags and libraries is very easy.

You can find KudzuPHP here: http://www.andrewfriedl.com/downloads/ If you want a version embedded in a Wordpress plugin that allows you to code against the Wordpress API without PHP go top Wordpress.org and search the plugins for "Kazoo".

Answer 3

I found that when I introduced Smarty, it was fairly straight forward to get web designers to produce HTML with smarty variables. The folks on the programming team now concentrate on more back-end work, that is, the production of the content of the Smarty variables.

This has shortened the development lifecycle, with work being able to be split between more people, and has ultimately led to better designs.

Answer 4

The following reasons apply:

• Separating your application into templates with an engine makes your application less vulnerable to halting code errors
• Using templates can give you greater flexibility in the future when refactoring because the namespace won't be directly built into the application
• Using templates encourages (forces) developers to keep business logic and code OUT of the presentation layer.
• Using templates it is easier to mock up datasets and pass them to a template engine and get a preview of what the site will look like with data

Answer 5

If I had to spend the time learning a standalone template engine, I would rather spend the time learning a Framework instead. My choice is to go with Zend Framework, which when implemented using an MVC approach, provides you with the power of the framework, along with the native templating capability of PHP itself.

Answer 6

currently, it the most faster and easier to use. After making a suite of benchmark on PHP templates engines, twig comes in the second place just after native php language.