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10-09-2007, 06:02 PM

[eluser]Rick Jolly[/eluser]
Good template engines will "compile" the template into php, so there isn't much of a performance hit. I've used Html_Template_Flexy and phptal with CI. Many others use Smarty.

Html_Template_Flexy is nice because it treats form fields as serializable objects - like asp.net form controls. It will save the form field state automatically, so there is no need to populate/repopulate form data in your views. It also allows you to set form field attributes in the controller in an object oriented way - again, just like asp.net.

Phptal is nice because it is a template attribute language. You'd need to read the documentation to appreciate that, but it allows you to create templates often without the {} syntax - the variables/conditionals/loops can all be defined within html tags. Here is the example from the phptal docs:

Code:
&lt;?xml version="1.0"?&gt;

&lt;html&gt;

  &lt;head&gt;

    &lt;title tal:content="title"&gt;

      this will be replaced with a dynamic page title

    &lt;/title&gt;

  &lt;/head&gt;

  &lt;body&gt;

    <h1 tal:content="title">this will be replaced with a dynamic page title</h1>

    <table>

      <thead>

        <tr>

          <th>name</th>

          <th>phone</th>

        </tr>

      </thead>

      <tbody>

        <tr tal:repeat="item result">

          <td tal:content="item/name">item name</td>

          <td tal:content="item/phone">item phone</td>

        </tr>

        <tr tal:replace="">

          <td>sample name - this row will not be visible when running on the server</td>

          <td>sample phone - this row will not be visible when running on the server</td>

        </tr>

      </tbody>

    </table>

  &lt;/body&gt;

&lt;/html&gt;