Smarty

This tutorial describes how to use the Smarty templating engine and the Zend Framework in order to create easily portable widgets.

I’m a great fan of using “decent” template engines, and try to avoid writing views in php. I don’t want to discuss the reasons behind this in detail right now. I just believe that limiting yourself to a small set of template tags makes you think more about structuring your output and separating logic from design. Which is a good thing.

Zend Framwork v0.6 has introduced new MVC code and one of the changes is that Zend_View_Interface now exists to allow for easy implementation of other templating engines other than PHP based ones like Zend_View or Savant. We use Smarty at work and when we migrate our content management framework to Zend Framework, we intend to continue using Smarty. Hence, I've created AkCom_View_Smarty to play with how we are going to use Smarty within the Zend Framework. I think that part of the release also has an implemention of Zend_View_Interface that uses Smarty, so it's worth looking at that solution too!

Here is a follow-up to the first part of the little tutorial Integrating Smarty with the Zend Framework. I want to address some of the issues in the comments of the first part and add some further information on how to setup your application to use the Travello_View_Smarty class. Along the way you learn how to integrate classes of the eZ Components.

I started to play around a bit to integrate the Smarty template engine into the Zend Framework. My ambition was to minimize the required code in the controller actions but stay close to the given Zend_View API. I also wanted to integrate the Smarty caching feature. Here is the code I came up with.

Zend FrameworkÂ’s View class has very bad capability for extending. It contains template variables but does not allow to access them, it has array with different pathes (templates, filters), but does not allow to add another type or access them. Therefor only way to use Smarty with Zend Framework is to abandon Zend_View and manipulate Smarty object directly.