On his blog today Shameer has posted an introduction to Smarty 3, the upcoming version of the popular PHP-based templating engine. He talks about some of the improvements that have been made since version 2 in several categories including:

• plugins
• file structure
• variable scope/storage
• template inheritance

The Smarty 3 API (as of beta 8 ) has been refactored to a syntax geared for consistency and modularity. The Smarty 2 API syntax is still supported, butwill throw a deprecation notice. You can disable the notices, but it is highly recommended to adjust your syntax to Smarty 3, as the Smarty 2 syntax must run through an extra rerouting wrapper.

Code snippets are included for things like the new templating syntax, object handling, assigning variables and working with the inheritance now available.