[Typo3-dev] drawbacks to using smarty in extensions?

[Kasper Skårhøj]

In Amsterdam we attended a talk on Smarty and had discussions about PHP
vs. Smarty. 

My personal claim was that IF there was some way of restricting what can
be done in terms of function calls/variable access in a PHP include file
THEN there would be no need for smarty; In other words, PHP is a
"dangerous" templating language to pass to a designer.
So I came up with the idea of making a little PHP-parser which had to
parse the PHP-template first and approve its content (for instance make
an error if an unlink() function was called - or better only allow a
certain subset of PHP functions like htmlspecialchars() etc). I did a
prototype which worked well but never finished anything since it was
just a little relaxation project in the evenings...

Anyways, we agreed in amsterdam that:
- We want people to make their own choice!

So, what follows natural is that someone take a deep breath and create
the TYPO3 meta-template engine which can interface with either XSLT,
TemplaVOila, Smarty or plain PHP or good-ole-###-markers. Plugins should
be written to support this engine - the engine should offer any of those
choises in all cases. Everyone would be happy.


- kasper