Smarty (template engine)

Last updated
Smarty
Developers Monte Ohrt, Messju Mohr, Uwe Tews
Initial release2000 (2000) [1]
Stable release
5.5.2 [2]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 26 August 2025;42 days ago (26 August 2025)
Repository
Written in PHP
Type Template Engine
License LGPL
Website www.smarty.net

Smarty is a web template system written in PHP. Smarty is primarily promoted as a tool for separation of concerns. [3] Smarty is intended to simplify compartmentalization, allowing the front-end of a web page to change separately from its back-end. Ideally, this lowers costs and minimizes the efforts associated with software maintenance.

Contents

Smarty generates web content through the placement of special Smarty tags within a document. These tags are processed and substituted with other code. Tags are directives for Smarty that are enclosed by template delimiters. These directives can be variables, denoted by a dollar sign ($), functions, logical or loop statements. Smarty allows PHP programmers to define custom functions that can be accessed using Smarty tags.

Smarty example

Since Smarty separates PHP from HTML, there are two files — one contains the presentation code: an HTML template, including Smarty variables and tags - {$title_text|escape}{$body_html} - which might look like this:

<!DOCTYPE html><htmllang="en"><head><metacharset="utf-8"><title>{$title_text|escape}</title></head><body>{* This is a little comment that won't be visible in the HTML source *}{$body_html}</body><!-- this is a little comment that will be seen in the HTML source --></html>

The business logic to use the Smarty template above could be as follows:

define('SMARTY_DIR','smarty-2.6.22/');require_once(SMARTY_DIR.'Smarty.class.php');$smarty=newSmarty();$smarty->template_dir='./templates/';$smarty->compile_dir='./templates/compile/';$smarty->assign('title_text','TITLE: This is the Smarty basic example ...');$smarty->assign('body_html','<p>BODY: This is the message set using assign()</p>');$smarty->display('index.tpl');

Further reading

See also

References

  1. ↑ "CVS log showing README added on 8/8/2000". php.net. Retrieved 6 October 2025.
  2. ↑ "Release 5.5.2". 26 August 2025. Retrieved 15 September 2025.
  3. ↑ Parr, Terence John (2004). Enforcing strict model-view separation in template engines. Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web. ISBN   1-58113-844-X.
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