I'd recommand you to use the HTML_TEMPLATE_IT. It's a PEAR class for templating; I've personaly worked on it for building skinnable applications in which users and admins can change the look of the pages. Bottom line, it's a PEAR library/extension so no hastle since most of the hosts include it in their PHP installations. This template does alot of handy jobs such as nested blocks templating and rendering. However, it does not have the bells and the whistles of Smarty. Simply it does the job, it's efficient, and very elegant since your HTML templates would have only 2 extra stuff. One which is the HTML style comments to define and close blocks and the, Two which is the variable names to be placed whithin curly braces. So templating does not realy have a language in IT it's just a ditributed method of writing HTML and feeding data which forms another Tier in your application not another Application by itself. Benefits you'll get by using this PEAR library/extension is that you wouldnt need to tutor the designers on how to use a procedural markup templating language hence more flexibility and shorter learning curve. And plus it does not need no configuration and you could write your own nice wrapper classes to do special things for you, such as rendering pages templates, or blockwise template files with predefined variable to be inserted in the template files.... simple as that. e.g. you could write a function or a class method to route template files and then only pass them an array and the function would do the whole thing from rendering to displaying..... especialy if you use the Web Standards and Semantic Design skinning would mean only switching CSSs and slight changes in your structural markup(template files). Note: If by any change your ISP/Host does not have the PEAR package installed you could just put it in a directory and simply append it to your include_dir directive so that you could include/require the class file (only 1 file is the whole package) directly w/o routing to its location. I'd honestly never implement Smarty for an application I'd work alone on and then give it up to designers.... I'd use Smarty while working with team mates of the same range of understanding of the Web Dev/ Design in a team environment for better performance and that's only if the application screens are more than 100 and the administration. HTH. M.Saleh.E.G 97150-4779817
