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Posted by Chris Hubbard on 04/07/05 02:42
As long as we're providing case study like things.
I built a web application for a media company. I built it to keep the
code as far away from the presentation as I could. Used Smarty of
course. The basic design was very modular. Each user accessible page
was just an array of modules that it displays. Each module was tied to
a class and it's own template. And there was a general page template
that all the other page templates were included (or fetch'ed
depending...) into.
About a week after delivering the code and templates, I discovered that
the graphic artist had built a whole new site using the same modules,
in sometimes different arrangements. Additional development time for
the second site? Zero. Last I heard they were going to build out half
a dozen, with no additional effort by development. Cool.
On another project we started moving common features into functions.
Things like pagination, table sorts, loading modules can all be done
with a registered smarty function. This leaves the programmer more
time for the tasks that are non-repetitive.
If you're building a small web site (less than 10 pages) and you don't
plan on changing anything besides copy. And you've already got good
programming practices, then (any) templates *might* be overkill. If
you have a site with lots of traffic, or lots of pages or both, then
templates, especially cached templates start making a lot of sense
really quickly.
And then there's how well the template approach fits into the design
methodology. Typically the designers build out the site, as a mockup
in HTML. Then I as a developer get to build the code and database
behind the mocked-up site. The HTML mockups basically become the
templates, with little to no additional work for the designer. Heck at
this rate neither the designer or the developer will need to do
anything, sites will just come together on their own!!
Chris
On Apr 6, 2005, at 7:44 AM, pete M wrote:
> David Ngo wrote:
>> At my work I work with a html designer and one other programmer. Both
>> of them refuse to learn to use Smarty and keep arguing that we should
>> do away with it. My boss's take on it is that Smarty adds complexity
>> with little benefit. Their solution is to just do away with the
>> templates and instead have php include files with html in them that
>> will act as the templates. We also have a proposed solution using xml
>> that can replace the caching options that Smarty has built in. I have
>> to come up with a few examples where using Smarty is a better
>> solution. Does anyone have any extremely convincing examples I can
>> use to change these people's minds? All of the examples I have seen
>> on the Smarty site and through google are very simplistic examples
>> that could easily be replaced by php includes. I do not want to move
>> away from Smarty because I feel it makes my code better structured,
>> easy to read, and just forces me to have better coding habits.
>> However how do I explain to someone that has never used Smarty and
>> refuses to learn it that it is the way to go? I fear that if I can't
>> come up with some good examples we will switch to the system of using
>> php includes as templates which I do not like at all.
>
> I use Smarty at work and its wonderful.
>
> I do the coding with php and pear db
> My collegue does the html templates and CSS
> The graphic designer does the images
>
> and we never clash
>
> it was a nightmare previously and Smarty has made us at least 200% more
> productive in terms of time and quality icon_wink.gif))
>
> Ta Monte icon_wink.gif
>
> pete
>
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