<table> {section name=art loop=$article} <tr> <td>{$article[art].headline}<td> <td>{$article[art].date}<td> <td>{$article[art].author}<td> </tr> {/section} </table>

The output may look something like this:

<table> <tr> <td>How the west was won<td> <td>Dec 2, 1999<td> <td>John Wayne<td> </tr> <tr> <td>Team loses, Coach quits<td> <td>Feb 2, 2002<td> <td>John Smith<td> </tr> <tr> <td>Gourmet Cooking<td> <td>Jan 23, 1954<td> <td>Betty Crocker<td> </tr> </table>

Now for some common questions:

Why use templates at all? What is so tough about writing <? echo $title; ?> instead of {$title}?

Making things easier to read wasn't a design goal, but more of a side effect. Using templates has huge benefits, many of which have been explained above. Since we are in a template environment anyways, {$title} is less extraneous than <?php echo $title; ?>, especially when you start looking at it in long pages of content, so it was pretty evident that a simpler syntax helps to make templates easier to read and maintain.

Template take time to parse, making applications much slower.

That may be true in some cases, but with Smarty it is no slower than executing a PHP script. On the first execution of a template, Smarty converts the template files into PHP scripts (called template compiling.) Thereafter, the PHP script is just included. Couple this with a PHP accelerator and you truly have a fast templating environment with minimal overhead.

Smarty is too complicated, how can it be that fast?

Smarty's core is pretty lean considering what it is capable of. Most of its functionality lies in plugins. The plugin architecture is designed so that only the required plugins are loaded on demand. With this framework, adding even hundreds of new plugins will not affect performance. This makes Smarty fast, scalable and flexible.

Smarty also has caching features that can dynamically refresh and keep portions of the page uncached at your liking. Caching stores the output of the compiled templates, saving the need to execute them on each invocation.

All this talk about accelerators, how does Smarty run without one?

Actually it runs pretty well without one. Smarty does not require an accelerator, but the template files themselves will take advantage of one, something that is unique to Smarty (AFAIK). If you don't have an accelerator, template execution isn't as fast but not slow by any means since they aren't parsed! You also retain all the other benefits and features of Smarty. Also, since accelerators are freely available there isn't really an excuse to not be using one. They'll help performance with all PHP apps, using Smarty or not.

How can it be easier to maintain?

Some things can't be explained, but only experienced :-) The benefit of separation of the application logic from the presentation cannot be stressed enough. Smarty also has some nice error handling features and a built-in debugging console so you can see the template heirarchy and assigned variables at a glance. Adding custom features to Smarty is as easy as dropping them in the plugin directory and mentioning them in the template.

The template tags are not XML based, My editor doesn't like it.

The {} delimiters are just a default, they are easy to discern among HTML tags. If you don't like them, change your delimiters to <% %> or maybe something more XMLish like <smarty: > There are also lots of user contributions for dreamweaver and the like, give them a look in the contribs area.

That's Smarty in a nutshell, hopefully you can add it to your arsenal of tools for web application building. To really learn more, read the manual top to bottom, join the forums and see what people are discussing.