What is Smarty? It’s a php templating engine. I’ve used Smarty on several projects and I like it’s simplicity. It forced me to keep my application logic separated from the presentation code. This is a must when organizing your code. The last thing you want is your designer browsing through hundreds of lines of code just to apply some html. Furthermore, Smarty comes with extra features such as built-in caching, vairable modifiers, filters, and much more including user contributed plugins.

How to install Smarty

Installing Smarty is a fairly simple process. I will break the installation process into 3 steps.

STEP 1 – Download and Extract
Grab the latest Smarty release from Smarty’s download section then extract the package into your application directory. Now rename the new directory created by the archive from “Smarty-x.x.x” to “smarty” for the sake of simplicity.

STEP 2 – Create required folders

Smarty requires some folders for caching purposes among other things. In your smarty directory create the following folders:

/path/to/application/smarty/cache
/path/to/application/smarty/configs
/path/to/application/smarty/templates
/path/to/application/smarty/templates_c

Then change the permissions of the newly created cache and templates_c folders to 755

STEP 3 – Create the smarty setup file

Create a file called smarty.php and put this wherever your application configuration folder is located. You’ll want to include this file in your application php files. So if you use a global index.php file or configuration file include it in there.

Here’s the following setup code for smarty.php

// put full path to Smarty.class.php
require('/path/to/application/smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php');
$smarty = new Smarty();

$smarty->template_dir = '/path/to/application/smarty/templates';
$smarty->compile_dir = '//path/to/application/smarty/templates_c';
$smarty->cache_dir = '/path/to/application/smarty/cache';
$smarty->config_dir = '/path/to/application/smarty/configs';

That’s it. Now whenever you want to display a template file, you’ll need to create that file in your templates folder (ie: /path/to/application/smarty/templates/index.tpl) and then you would call this template from your php file with the following code

$smarty->assign('title', 'Hello World'); // creates a variable 'title' with the string "Hello World" in your template file
$smarty->display('index.tpl');

In your template file you can access the title variable using the following syntax: {$title}
This is a fairly simple way to get started with Smarty.

Here is a crash course on using this engine from the Smarty website – Smarty Crash Course

If you’re already familiar with Smarty, here’s a handy cheat sheet from somewherein.

One last thing. If you’re a CakePHP user I don’t really recommend using Smarty because CakePHP’s template system is much more convenient, nonetheless, there is a way integrate Smarty with CakePHP. Read the article at the bakery.

There’s a few WAMP packages out there that make having a php web server on windows as simple as installing a program. I started off using Xampp from apachefriends.org but I had problems running cakePHP with it. Both Xampp and CakePHP have made many improvements since then and they are now compatible with each other. However, when I had problems I switched to WAMP5 from wampserver.com.

In terms of features, both packages are similar. However, Xampp offers SSL support and WAMP5 does not. WAMP5, on the other hand, is lightweight and about half the size of the Xampp package. You can also add SSL support for WAMP5 by following this tutorial.

Wiki has a nice article comparing all of the main WAMP packages out there. Read more

Download WAMP5 | Download XAMPP

Since I’ve posted the Drupal article, I was hoping that Joomla would be the next CMS to have integration with Cake. What I like about Joomla is their administration interface. I’ve been playing around with Joomla 1.5 Beta 2 and they have really cleaned it up nicely. Unfortunately it’s taking them awhile to release a stable version, but I’m sure we’ll be pleased once it does finally released.

After doing some searching it looks like the Joomla – CakePHP integration has become a reality. The folks at Giga Promoters have posted an article on how this can be done. Read the full story here

I’ve recently been studying for the Zend PHP 5 certification exam and so far the study guide has been a disappointment. I’ll soon write a full review for the study guide, but at the moment I’m looking to helpful resources for passing the exam. I’ve read it is much harder than the PHP 4 exam, which doesn’t surprise me, but it’s a bit discouraging reading posts in the PHP | Architect forums that the study guide and practice tests didn’t help. I keep passing the practice tests, but from what I hear they are easier than the real thing, contrary to what php architect says.

If anyone one has any helpful resources I’d appreciate it if you emailed me or posted on here.

Drupal is a powerful open source content management system and on Monday, January 18th, they have released version 5.0. I strongly recommend this CMS as it’s one of the most flexible systems in the open source market. Also, it’s free!.

To see this CMS in action, click here to view a demo

Or you can install it yourself by downloading it from Drupal.

For the CakePHP users out there, you can create third party modules using cake for Drupal. Read this tutorial if you’re interested