One of the mostly widely used PHP scripts out there (besides PHP-Nuke, of course) is the Smarty Template Engine, used for making your site much easier to maintain by using compiled templates to speed up your site, and a simple, easy-to-learn template "language" to help you get on your way. Well, SitePoint has graced us with a nice intro article for this very template engine - Introduction to Smarty - The PHP Template Engine.

This article covers everything from why and how this system compiles the templates that it makes (to reduce overhead) to the configuration and plugin files that the system uses. Now, don't look at this article thinking that you're going to find a tutorial. This is more of just a "Here's Smarty and here's what it does" kind of piece that gives you the basic idea of the template engine. From there, you can see if it would fit your needs as a business/personal site or not.