In this article I'll introduce five of PHP's most popular templating engines, providing you with a basis for continuing your own investigations. Keep in mind however that this list is by no means definitive; if you have experience using a templating engine not discussed here, please tell us about it in the comments!

The five template engines the author chose to spotlight are:

• Smarty
• Dwoo
• Twig
• Savant3
• PHPTal

Each comes with a description of its major features and a code snippet or two showing it in use.

In the previous segment of this article, I introduced you to Dwoo, a powerful, PHP 5.x template engine that allows Web application developers easily separate the user interface of their application from its business logic. [...] In this second, and concluding, segment, I'll delve a little deeper, exploring some of Dwoo's lesser-known features.

He talks about the ability for template inheritance, creating sub-templates (like partial views), plugins available, mail merging, caching and how to use it as the templating engine in your framework of choice.

When discussing the best practices of PHP application development, there's one that appears on almost every list: separating the business logic of a Web application from its user interface. This separation lets interface designers work on a site's appearance without disrupting the code of the application developers implementing business-level features and workflows. [...] However, if your project is small enough that you don't need a framework (or if you just don't like them), you can still achieve the same benefits by using a standalone template engine.

He introduces the framework by showing the installation process (via the PEAR installer) and some basic templates with simple replacement string placeholders. He also includes the code to give you an idea of the PHP side of things. With the basics down, he gets into more advanced things like looping, conditionals and including multiple templates inside to make modular templating even easier.

Not wanting to spend too much time re-inventing the wheel I had a look at existing templating engines and decided to use Dwoo. [...] So after a little head-scratching, we now have CodeIgniter-Dwoo. DwooParser? DwooIgniter? Whatever we call it, my new Dwoo implementation for CodeIgniter sits in with "the CodeIgniter way" perfectly and the only code you will need to change within your application is the Parser file and your view files. No changes to your controllers at all!

You can download the library from the code section of his site.

PHP template engines are used widely to seperate the code & the layout. PHP makes a website easier to maintain/update & creates a better development environment by enabling developers & designers to work together easier. It sure has some drawbacks which is generally the performance (most libraries offer great solutions there) & need to learn a new syntax (not always).

Some of the engines included in the list are:

• Smarty
• Savant
• TinyButStrong
• PHPTAL
• the template engines under PEAR (like HTML_Template_Flexy)

• COnsole_CommandLine - a port of the PEAR1 console package
• Template_Dwoo - a Smarty-compatible template engine
• template_engine - a simple templating engine (and the example package for namespace usage)

Not really what I expected to be the first round of new code, but its nice to be setting up access for people. Oh and remember PEAR2 is targeted at php 5.3 but not everything is namespaced yet since not everyone wants to run snapshots of php for development.

You can find more of the packages on the PEAR2 svn repository.

Early this year I wanted to rebuild my template engine to have something stronger to work with, so I started thinking about it and then asked myself why I didn't use one of the available engines out there. The fact is that - and I guess I will lose many of my few readers here - I am not fond of using php itself as a template engine (with Savant or similar).

Features of the templating engine include a striking similarity to Smarty's methods, the fact that its code is scope aware, it has template inheritance and comes with a plugin system that can be extended as you see fit.

You can get complete information about the engine from the Dwoo homepage.