New on his blog today Fabien Potencier tackles a tough topic for the PHP community - templating languages and whether or not their that useful/good after all.

So, you think PHP is a templating engine? So did I... for a very long time. But recently, I changed my mind. Even if PHP can be used as a templating engine, the syntax is just plain ugly as a template language. [...] So, when I asked a few days ago about the best and popular templating engines in PHP on Twitter, some people naturally answered "PHP" itself. I was not even surprised as that would probably have been my answer some weeks ago too.

He suggests that PHP, by itself, just isn't good enough any more and that truly robust templating languages (no, not like that one) can make a huge improvement in the quality of your application. He touches on a few related points including reusability, security and some of the current templating tools for PHP - Smarty, PHPTAL, eZ Components templates, Dwoo, Calypso and his own incarnation - Twig. He also includes some stats on rendering times and memory usage for each.

UPDATE: After all of the response that the PHP gave back to this article, Fabien also posted a follow-up with a bit more information on Twig.