I recently did a study for a template system in PHP. The requirements were :
-fast
-light
-cacheable compiled templates
-prevent too much logic in the template

Finally, the 2 best candidates were Template Lite and phpTAL.

We chose phpTAL because it requires you to write valid XHTML and have a cleaner documentation.

regards,
chris

Chrs,

Thank you for sharing your research result. The last time PHPTAL was updated is back in December 2005. Do you see any problem with this.

Thank you.

Maru

Thanks for the nice blog about Template Lite. I really appreciate it.

One of the things I am really striving to do with Template Lite is expand upon the function set far more than Smarty. Adding functions like FOR, WHILE, array parsing and database access is just one way of doing that. Some of the ideas come from users and some squirrel they way out of my subconscious.

If anyone has any suggestions for extending Template Lite I am always open to them. That doesn’t mean I will add them but I will definitely look into them.

I think that all of the HTML functions in Template Lite are XHTML compliant. That is basically all that is really needed for XHTML support with Template Lite.

So as long as you create a template file that is XHTML compliant than Template Lite will export XHTML compliant pages.

Actually, the latest phpTAL is 1.1.5 from 2006-04-09. The home page wasn't updated, but the RSS feed was. I highly recommend phpTAL.

And I highly recommend Template Lite…;)

It’s still good to see phpTAL get a few recommendations though.

Or you can simply use PHP! PHP IS a template-ready language.

Consider this template:

[geshi lang=html]

< ?=ucfirst($article->title)?>

< ?=nl2br(htmlentities($article->body))?>

Now, this is the function to render it:

[geshi lang=php]
function render_template( $file, $vars = array(‘abc’ => 123))
{
foreach($vars as $k => $v)
eval(“\$$k =& \$vars[$k];”);
ob_start();
include($file);
return ob_get_clean();
}
[/lang]

And this is the controller code to use it:

[geshi lang=php]
$output = render_template(‘article.tpl’, array(
‘page_title’ => ‘My Site – ‘.$article->title,
‘article’ => $article,
‘time_posted’ => time()
))
[/lang]

My vote is for Template Lite because it's a drop-in replacement for Smarty!!