Which template engine do you use..?

[eluser]dtrenz[/eluser]
[quote author="DerekF" date="1205271430"]
My point being that what seems obviously clearer to you is not necessarily clearer to everyone else because neither of the code samples you provided suit me. (Again, this is a personal opinion, not trying to ruffle feathers here.)[/quote]

I see your point (though I wouldn't even bother with curly braces), but then you're not really formatting your PHP in a template manner.

If one of the goals of a template (which I believe it should be) is to create simple designer-friendly presentation logic, it seems to me that a designer with limited to no knowledge of PHP would work better with the short_open_tag versions.

I, also, would like to apologize for hijacking this thread. Although, I think that coding presentation logic in PHP should be a major considerations when deciding whether to use a template engine or not, especially if you are concerned with overhead or performance optimization.

I'm curious if anyone has seen any benchmarking of various popular template systems? How expensive is something like Smarty, anyway?