Over on DevShed.com this morning, there's a new piece about Template-Based Web Development With patTemplate. For those that are lost already, patTemplate is is a PHP-based template engine designed, in the author's words, to "help you separate program logic or content from layout". Developed by Stephan Schmidt, it is freely available for download and is packaged as a single PHP class which can be easily included in your application. Honestly, these templating systems are nice, but unless one has a feature that really appeals to you, why use them? For example, in their examples you still have to set varaibles and give them values and echo out certain HTML elements to make the page load right, so why not just custom write that part and be done with the templates? I've found that just a good "header" and "footer" file have been sufficient for what I need to do...Do you guys use any of the other templating systems? What do you think of them?

Also today, PHPComplete.com has a new tutorial on Working with Form Variables in PHP 4.2+. As most people know, there was a pretty major change not too long ago with the way PHP handles globals. This, in turn, effected a lot of people scripts so they didn't work anymore. Well, this article shows you (pretty simply) how you can use PHP now that those changes have been made (mainly through $_GET, $_POST, and $_REQUEST).