Smarty Theme Engine or wgSmarty?

The phptemplate will be the default theme engine for the upcoming 4.7 release and it is also available for drupal 4.6.

Many template are available for the phptemplate engine.

Do you have a specific requirement for smarty?

Though I may be biased....

as I maintain the (non-wg)Smarty Theme Engine.

I suppose it has been long enough to remove the "recently updated"...

I think the non-wg Smarty is much superior and think his much more closely integrated claim is dubious since I made updates when I took over.

I've offered quick support and have been using it for every drupal project I've worked on, ever.

There is some somewhat-undocumented flexibility with the per-theme, user-defined register_functions function which removes virtually all need for {php} tags. This function name is being removed to favor 'smarty_register_functions' instead.

Quick example:

in per-theme smartytemplate.php:

// this registers our functions with the engine so they are accessible within our tpl files
// this function will be expected to be named 'smarty_register_functions' in the future
function register_functions() {
  return array('assign_is_admin' => 'do_smarty_assign');
}
function do_assign_is_admin($params, &$smarty) {
  global $user;
  $var_name = isset($params['var_name']) ? $params['var_name'] : 'is_admin';
  $smarty->assign($var_name, $user->uid == 1);	
}

in a template (.tpl) :

...
{assign_is_admin}
{if $is_admin}<p>Hello Admin!</p>{/if}
{* and to make the example more interesting: *}
{assign_is_admin var_name='superuser'}
{if $superuser neq true}
  {* call an imaginary function that returns output directly *}
  {run_imaginary_function_for_nonadmin param1=$value2 param2=4 param3='pineapple'}
{/if}
<p>Lowly .</p>
..

Recent more advanced implementation description

I implemented a previous/next navigation among peers at the current menu level in a very elegant and flexible manner if I don't say so myself. It ends up assigning a previous and a next variable (prefix supported) to smarty (as an array or false if the link doesn't exist) and I check whether to show a greyed link or the active link. I even have the node title (i.e. $previous.title) in there for an anchor title="" attribute or alt-text on an image).

Smarty Variables

Also, currently assigned Smarty values are available in the smartytemplate.php functions as $smarty->vars['var_name'] (use func_get_arg(1)) where {$var_name} would be available within the template scope.

One caveat is to access currently assigned variables within a {php} block in a template file you must use $this.vars['var_name']

The Code

I also am more closely in line with the coding conventions (1 class naming error I'm choosing to ignore see http://drupal.org/files/projects/smarty.status vs http://drupal.org/files/projects/wgsmarty.status ), do permission checks and alert the user before rendering site unusable by activating a Smarty theme without proper directory permissions on the templates_c directory. It's a more direct port of phptemplate so future changes will be easier to merge and maintain and themes will be (and are!) very easy to move over.

I did choose not to support some extraneous options. Though it doesn't support Smarty caching (it would be an easy addition but I doubt there's much desire for it -- we have a layer of caching already).

Reading the open issues for wgSmarty -> http://drupal.org/project/issues/wgsmarty shows that a custom per-theme .php file isn't currently supported which is a great detriment.

Themes

I offer to convert any existing phptemplate theme if requested. It's a very easy process.
The code is much cleaner and you lose virtually nothing in terms of speed (a few cycles).

The cleanliness of the code and manageability thereon out is wonderful especially if you have a designer that isn't php-keen.

Statistics

2266 downloads for Smarty Theme Engine vs 567 for wgSmarty Theme Engine and two bugs arose for wgSmarty in that time.

Drawback

There is one issue in that I chose not to implement individual primary and secondary links as I saw it as a kludge (as it is template-engine-wide in 4.6.x).

I'll update for 4.7 which supports this natively and if I get enough requests for a backport (won't really be much of a backport afaik) I'll do so.

Whew.

I think there are other advantages, feel free to bring up any issues.

Sorry if that came out rantish, I tried to provide some sort of though organization..

Travis