Comment I dislike them (Score 1) 90
I have come over to the school of thinking that template engines are unneccesary, as php is it's own bestest fastest most robust templating engine.
Once you realise that a) suitably complex templates will require some form of presentation logic and b) implementing said logic in a template language is completely unneccesary overhead.
The only exception i will make to this is phptal (http://phptal.sourceforge.net) , which is a php implementation of zope page templates.
All tal templates are 100% well formed xml documents, and a namespace is used for the templating functions. ie
<span tal:replace="page.header">placekeeper</span>
when they are interpreted .. the entire tag is replaced.
This has the effect of making the template actually BE the static html created by your designer.
The biggest problem with phptal however is performance, as php4 doesnt make good enough use of object orientation to make it beneficial yet.
The author is going to reimplement it for php5 though, so it will most likely be my standard templating engine in a few years
Once you realise that a) suitably complex templates will require some form of presentation logic and b) implementing said logic in a template language is completely unneccesary overhead.
The only exception i will make to this is phptal (http://phptal.sourceforge.net) , which is a php implementation of zope page templates.
All tal templates are 100% well formed xml documents, and a namespace is used for the templating functions. ie
<span tal:replace="page.header">placekeeper</span>
when they are interpreted
This has the effect of making the template actually BE the static html created by your designer.
The biggest problem with phptal however is performance, as php4 doesnt make good enough use of object orientation to make it beneficial yet.
The author is going to reimplement it for php5 though, so it will most likely be my standard templating engine in a few years
