On the TechFounder blog, Eran Galperin has taken a look at object-oriented templating in PHP applications, comparing the older search and replace method with the inclusion of PHP-based templates.

PHP as a language can be considered a templating system, as in its root it was meant to modify HTML pages dynamically. The need for more structured templating systems arose as PHP applications have grown more and more complex, giving birth to much more specialized and focused solutions.

He illustrates with an object replacement example - parsing the template as a PHP script and replacing any objects found with the corresponding object property value.