The result is an interface where an administrator can settle money transfers. It will start with displaying a list of all requested transfers, when the administrator has manually finished transferring cash to each recipient's account he can use this interface to update the database.

He briefly explains the code, a combination of a jQuery function run on page load, a Smarty template for each transfer's information and the backend code through the Zend Framework to handle the requests issued from the button click.

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.

• Smarty Template: Introduction
• Smarty Template: Installation
• Smarty Template: My First Smarty
• Smarty Template: Basics That You Must Know
• Smarty Variable: Associative Arrays
• Smarty Variable: Array Index
• Smarty Variable: Object
• Smarty Variable: Variable at Configuration File
• Smarty Variable: Reversed Variable

Check out PHPEveryDay.com for more great PHP articles and tutorials.

The PHP 5 Iterator interface is very useful for defining custom behaviour for looping over objects, however I just noticed that looping over such objects in Smarty will not work correctly. Smarty will in fact cast an object back to an array.

He includes code examples of his problem to illustrate and shows how he got around the problem - a getData() function he defined that just returns the array from the object.

This article aims to highlight a approach which allows one to separate everything from one's business logic to one's design logic, to XHTML from CSS, one's Javascript from the page structure, etc., while at the same time being able to be lazy and include, for example, CSS information within the same document (template) as one's XHTML

The tutorial uses an extension for Smarty called SmartyDocB that makes the documentation side much easier. He works through the templating process and includes some of the code for the .tpl files to get you started.

He also includes some future goals for his idea, a mention of XSL templating, XQuery and the potential for templating across programming languages to make your site even more flexible.

• this one from blueshoes.org
• a sheet covering filtering and escaping
• a Smarty cheat sheet
• a few covering WordPress
• and ones covering CakePHP and Drupal

Check out his page for more (and thumbnails for each).

We will first learn how block plug-ins can be used in your templates, and then learn how to create our own. Once we know how to create a block plug-in, we will cover a practical example that will show you how block plug-ins can effectively be used in your own web sites.

The tutorial assumes that you already have Smarty installed and that you're familiar enough with it to know how to work with the plug-in system right away. They include some samples of how it can be used (a default block, formatting it with HTML) and, of course, how to integrate this (PHP code and all) into your template and push your content into it.

As I mentioned in my blog post on Paparrazzi testing, Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin) has discussed how to test web templates or server pages. Since I'm currently working with Smarty templates, I wanted a simple way to run tests on them without needing to deal with a web server and the page navigation in a full web application.

Thankfully, he's found a nice, simple method for running tests against the Smarty engine (and includes that in the post - an interface to Smarty and the example test case to run against it).

This piece covers creating a proper folder structure so that we can have a skin system. I've also created a folder for the admin section which is fully contained with it's own controllers folder and so on. Another unrelated change that has happened since the last part is sub menu logic which we will also take a look at.

They make updates to the bootstrap file to introduce another controller directory and, inside of that, create the Administrator controller and integrate it with a Smarty template to show different menu items if an admin user is logged in.

He points out Hasin Hayder's post on the subject. Hasin (ironically author of a Smarty book) has recently come to the conclusion that there "is no need to use an external template engine like smarty".

Some nice guys over there developed smarty and it saved life of a lot of developers (i mean developers). But that time is over. Seriously why the hell I need to learn a new templating language when a "echo" does the thing much better.

Judging by the responses to both Hasin's post and Paul's post it seems like quite a bit of the PHP community agrees (including Michael Kimsal, Harry Fuecks and Brian Lozier).