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.

Ever wanted to generated PDF documents on the fly with PHP? Perhaps populate a standard contract with a customers name and address? FPDF and FPDI are two neat libraries which greatly helps when working with PDF files.

FPDF handles most of the work of creating and working with the PDF files while FPDI works together with it to pull in existing PDF files so FPDF can modify them. He links to some sample code you can try out once you've installed the two libraries.

• 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.

In this article we're going to take a stab at setting up a default blog style, using some filler content, and finally capturing the design with a Zend_View template to be consumed by Zend_Layout as a common HTML Layout for the entire future blog.

He uses the Blueprint CSS framework for his projects, a simple system that helps you lay out pages it a bit more sensible fashion without having to worry about the underlying CSS so much. He shows how to integrate the library into his project and gives some sample HTML to style with it. Then, with a little help from the Zend_Layout component, he splits it up into a layout that can be used over the entire website (code included).

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.

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).

There's always a bridge between textbook knowledge of programming - syntax, procedure etc. - and the real world knowledge that you get from actually developing real applications. Here are five things every PHP developer should be familiar with before they begin developing web applications in PHP

The list is:

• Frameworks
• Templating engines Code availability
• Don't reinvent the wheel
• IRC is a wonderful thing

I'm a particular fan of that last one and regularly hang out in the same ##php channel over on Freenode.

The blog saga continues, we still don't have any fancy Wordpress style filtering of the content. You know, creating these nice looking quotes and filtering potentially nasty html and stuff. Sure enough, TinyMCE has some function for allowing only certain tags and discarding others...

They work on some of the administrative functionality and methods to grab more custom lists of articles. They cover some of the Smarty templates for the admin pages and the new functionality to handle things like removing articles and updating their contents.

Check out the full article for the rest of this (extensive) part of the series.