There are no plans nor do I think their should be.
The premise of Smarty is screwy to me.
There is some idea that out there somewhere are “template developers” that aren’t allowed to touch “teh sacred PHP”. So we need an abstracted templating language so that they can do loops and conditionals in their HTML templates.
I don’t believe these people actually exist and that if they do, they should just use PHP and be trained to a point where they are trust-worthy.
99% of Design should be held in the CSS now anyway. The code/display separation thing has moved up a level these days.
Using Gallery (which uses Smarty) is mostly an annoyance. Getting layouts to work as I want in Smarty is harder than hjust mucking around with CSS, I’ve had to hack code which to me defeats the purpose. Also you have to purge your template cache every time you make a change to the layout, which is a pain.
Smarty’s a nice idea, but it’s ONE MORE thing to learn for a PHP/SQL driven site.
Everyone seems to have their own preference for template engines. I personally really like Smarty as long as the way the script is developed it makes it easy to make changes. It does have pluses and minuses just like everything. But for me the way bbpress is setup I really do not see the need for Smarty. It is already simple and easy to make changes to suit your needs.
@Sam:
You know, I think about this everyday, but between you and me (and everyone else reading) I’m convinced more and more that no one really has any idea how to code XHTML, or what kind of object should rightfully be used to encapsulate content.
For the first 20 years of the modern web, everything was done in tables. For the last 5 years of the modern web, everything is being done in lists, divs, and paragraphs. Half the time things are marked up as paragraphs even though they aren’t actually blocks of text. The other half things are marked up as lists even though they contain 1 link. (WordPress and bbPress both suffer from this type of issue, specifically in the pagination and previous/next functions.)
One thing that the Smarty engine does promote, is keeping ALL of the XHTML out of the source code, allowing “template designers” to focus ONLY on the mark-up and then inserting the Smarty tags where the dynamic content belongs.
I’ve noticed that Automattic products tend to really try to think ahead in terms of a typical layout and what their audiences want, and that’s not a bad idea usually… But when the audience changes their mind and wants to go from UL’s to DL’s, inserting a DT becomes impossible and the function is immediately flawed by design. A Smarty type of engine avoids this all together.
Smarty is way too big and fat to include in either WP or BBP in my opinion. We’d be better off with a slimmed down version that’s used in CHBB, which I would LOVE to see implemented personally…
