I've been doing research about PHP/MySQL based CMS's. One of the greatest needs of a good CMS is a well built templating engine.
The Templating Engine drives the aggregation of your web sites templates with your sites content. There's a whole slew of them out there. The most well know is probably Smarty. It's more or less the "official" templating engine (at least it's hosted by the PHP.net web site).
Based on what I've read on the WACT TemplateView page, there are better engines available.
Of course, the WACT site says that it's template engine is the best, and give that is "smells" good their probably right. I've only played with it a little, and found it very promising but a little confusing in spots. I'm sure when WACT is finished it will be one of the best templating engines for PHP. One small problem for some is that WACT's template engine is tied to the framework.
Another template engine that "smells" good is TinyButStrong. It seems to meet many of the design requirements that the WACT developers laid out in their wiki (see also BadTemplateSmells). It's has a relatively small footprint (93k) and comes packaged in one class file. It's very easily extendible through the use of the MergeField() method.
The manual that's available on their site is very informative and easy to understand.
My plan right now is to use TinyButStrong for most of the PHP apps I right with the possibility of moving to WACT when it's stable.
Other frameworks (similar to WACT) under consideration right now are Phrame and Mojavi.
Posted by TheIdeaMan at September 7, 2004 08:35 AM | TrackBack