[Typo3-dev] Smarty integration

[Bart Veldhuizen]

Hi,

I have been learning Typo3 for the last few weeks and I think it's an 
amazing tool with a wonderfully active and supportive community. At this 
moment, I am trying to determine if we can use Typo for the new websites 
of Blender, a GPL 3d modeling/animation tool (see www.blender.org). 
Also, people at my job are quite impressed with Typo's qualities and 
have already started discussions of replacing some Tridion installations 
with Smarty. Not bad! :)

While I understand Typoscript and I think it's quite good for 
configuration issues, I find that it makes templating websites overly 
complex. Worse, I'm afraid that it's quite hard to maintain. The people 
(volunteers) who will be helping us are quite knowledgeable in PHP and 
also in Smarty. Since I couldn't find any plugins that support Smarty, 
I've started to work on one myself to see if it could be done. Based on 
the css_styled_content plugin, I've created a plugin that renders the 
default content types with simple Smarty templates such as:

{* render bullet lists *}
{if $cObj.CType == 'bullets'}

	{if $cObj.header != ''}
		<h2><font color=blue>{$cObj.header}</font>
			{$headerEditIcons}</h2>
	{/if}

	{foreach from=$lines item=line}
		<li>{$line}
	{/foreach}

	{$editIcons}

{/if}

Ultimately, I would like to replace the template auto parser with a 
Smarty template as well.

My questions are these:

- While I feel that this is within my reach, I run into some problems 
because most of the core functions of Typo generate full HTML instead of 
'clean' content structures. For example, in 
class.tslib_content::IMGTEXT(), I would like to receive the 'bare' data, 
unmixed with HTML. The only solution that I have now is to parse the 
results and rebuild the data myself - definately not a very robust 
solution ;-) Are there any hooks into Typo that would allow me to do 
this? Alternatively, are there any plans to further separate content and 
presentation?

- Does my Smarty approach make sense, or have I completely missed the 
concept of TypoScript and should I just study a bit longer?

- Are there any Smarty integration projects going on already? I couldn't 
find anything on the web, but I would hate to duplicate someone else's 
work..

I hope I've come to the right place for these questions.

Cheers,

Bart