Can I use system variables or functions if using view parser

For completeness, I'll follow up with how I found adding a fuller featured template engine.

After a bit of reading, it seemed like Smarty was gonna suit me best, so grabbed that and its Codeigniter integration code (Smartie altho the way it is loaded in the autoloader makes the latter invisible). Overall pretty painless. Redoing the Codeigniter News tutorial, essentially the changes were:

Code:

$this->load->view('x', $data);
to:
$this->smarty->view('x.tpl', $data);

<php? echo $x ?> to {$x}
<php? echo $var['x'] ?> to {$var.x}
<php? foreach ... ?> to {foreach ...}

<php? echo base_url(); ?> to {base_url()}

So my news/create view then looked like:

Code:

<h2>{$title}</h2>
 
{validation_errors()}

<form method="post" action="{base_url()}news/create">

   <label for="title">Title</label>
   <input type="input" name="title" /><br />

   <label for="text">Text</label>
   <textarea name="text"></textarea><br />

   <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Create news item" />

</form>

So finally, thanks for you help and suggestions.

regards
Mark